


Plant Life

by Kittywitch



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Bugs & Insects, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, Plants, Songfic, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-16 01:51:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 51,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittywitch/pseuds/Kittywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Peri find an abandoned house on an alien planet and investigate it.<br/>Once there, Peri suffers from what she takes to be hallucinations, and the local flora turns somewhat hostile.</p><p>"Do you not find it in the least bit worrying that a botanist and a timelord found a place where someone was experimenting with plants and time travel?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sheets on the Tables and Chairs

    The building rose out of the forest as if it was yet another tree that reached its maximum growth long ago and was overtaken by smaller, younger plants. The house itself was several stories of weathered finery; mansard roofs that sagged with age, chipped moulding and paint cracked, railings and knobs dull with patina. And all of it was covered with moss and lichen and trailing vines. The house was beautiful, if you had an eye for entropy. Peri didn't, for the most part, but she did have an eye for plants, and  there was plenty of those.

    "There was an earth colony here." said the Doctor, picking his way through the undergrowth. "Gone now, obviously; but not so long ago to have not left traces..." He pointed at the building ahead of them. Peri worked through the overgrowth until she came abreast of the Doctor. It was hard keeping up with his long strides, particularly through the dense foliage that surrounded them, but she had no fear of losing him in the forest. She was fairly sure she would be able to see that coat of his through a lead curtain.  
    "You can see it in the architecture: very clearly trying to micmic second empire France. Distinctly earth, and distinctly opulent, even in this decrepit state. Which is odd: in the time period  I would guess that to have been built, stark Chen-era elegance was far more the fashion on Earth colonies. Sleek, clean, bright, not a centimetre wasted..."  
    "Then why do you think it was built in... when did you say it was built?" Peri asked, coming abreast of her friend.  
    "Well, according to the Tardis, we've landed in the mid twenty-five hundreds, and I wouldn't think that this was abandoned for less than ten years. I suppose this could have been maintained as a matter of classical taste for some time before that and then abandoned recently. Or built to someone's ideal of a past era and then abandoned recently. It doesn't really matter which."  
    He glanced backwards to see if Peri was still listening to him. She might have been, vaguely, but her attention was more focused on negotiating the path.  
    "I don't see why you lugged that thing all the way out here." the Doctor commented, watching Peri disentangle the bag she'd slung over her shoulder from a nearby bush.  
    "Excuse me for taking an interest in examining the planet for once." Peri answered angrily, snapping a vine to free the satchel.  
    "Very well, you're excused." replied the Doctor with a smile. He held out a hand to her, which she took with a resentful scowl and clambered along with him. The Doctor kept his eyes on her long enough to see that she was coming, then turned back to what there was of a path. The Doctor and Peri moved though the brush as quickly as they were able given that the Doctor had to hold a branch aside every few steps. He did this without releasing her hand, and, for the most part, without the branches snapping back on their bodies. It was more than leading and less than dragging, and very much how the Doctor liked to move when Peri wasn't keeping up with him.  
    "I see you've brought a pressed flower book."  
    "There's a little more to it than that..." she frowned. "I really haven't been able to study much and I've never really seen plants like these before. I thought I could get some mountings and see if there's anything on them in the Tardis library."  
    "So you're intending to bring strange, unknown life forms onto my Tardis?" the Doctor asked, affronted.  
    "Well, if you don't want me to, you could have mentioned it before I dragged the book out here!" Peri cried. "I was only thinking of little specimens, just enough to be able to recognise them by."  
    "How could I have mentioned when I didn't know that's what you were planning to do?" the Doctor demanded.  
    "Why did you think I had the book for?!" she snapped.  
    "I don't know!" said the Doctor. "I thought if I asked you would start shouting; and it should surprise no one that I was right on that count!"  
    "Do you have a problem with me studying the local flora? Does it make you feel cleverer if I don't show signs of thinking?"  
    "That's not it at all!" the doctor snapped. "I quite approve of you furthering your research."  
    "Then why are you upset?" she asked.  
    "I just don't like you assuming that I'll let you do whatever you want. It's taking advantage of my generous nature."  
    " _'Your generous nature?'_ " Peri repeated sceptically.  
    "Yes, my generous nature!" he shouted, stopping and facing her. " 'Fix this, Doctor!' 'We must help them, Doctor!' 'You must lose a bit of weight, Doctor! But fix that circuit first!' 'Take me here, take me away!' 'Stop shouting, stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop breathing, it's scaring me!' 'Save me, Doctor!' I bear your every complaint and do all in my considerable power to meet your desires--your whims! How can you call that less than generous?"  
    He paused her for just long enough to stare balefully at her and drive home the image of him as an abused but faithful animal.  
    "Nearly all I do is in pursuit of your happiness, and you deny me even that!" he concluded.  
    "Oh, don't be so dramatic!" Peri grumbled.  
    "That's it precisely! My very manner offends you, and my effort to be any less of what I am, entirely for your sake I might add, will be dismissed, you ungrateful girl."  
    "Now stop it." she frowned. "I never said I was ungrateful." She took his hand again, this time in both of hers. The Doctor stared down at their hands for a moment, looking somewhat chastened, then flicked his eyes up to her face. He moved his free hand over the hers. Peri gave him a smile, which he returned. They smiled at one another, probably for longer than was strictly necessary, but there was no one there to object.  
    "...really, though." Peri said at length. "I do want to see more of this planet."  
    "Then we are in agreement." said the Doctor, dropping her hands. "Let's start with that house, shall we? It is  a bit anomalous."  
    "Okay. But I _am_   serious about the cuttings. I won't take anything you don't want on the Tardis, you can approve them. They'll be dead once they're mounted, anyway. It's just this planet... well, look at it." She ran her hands through some nearby leaves.  
    "Is this because the scanner didn't show any large animal life?" the Doctor asked.  
    "Not entirely." Peri admitted. "I actually do want to take a minute to have a look at some of the plant life. I'll probably never get a chance to examine these again, unless I mount some."  
    The Doctor smiled at her.  
    "You sound so much like myself at a young age." he said fondly. Peri made a face.  
    "That put me off it fast." she replied. The Doctor laughed.  
    "That's a pity. I was looking forward to seeing more of your intellectual side." He took her arm and started walking again.  
    "Although," Peri admitted. "It does sound nice to stop somewhere with no one to try and kill me, or eat me, or decide after ten minutes of me being grossed out by them that I'd make a good wife."  
    "Or mistake you for mine." added the Doctor.  
    "Or mistake me for yours, right Doctor."

    The travellers came upon a stone fence, a bit higher than the Doctor's waist and by that virtue about chest height on Peri. She tried to press through the growth and get a better look at the fence, to see if she could find a gate or a patch where the stones had fallen away low enough to cross, but the deer (or whatever woodland animal this planet had) trail petered out.  
    "I'm not seeing the gate..."  
    "There's no need for that, Peri." said the Doctor. He kicked the growth away enough to find a foothold and hoisted himself on top. "This is nothing compared to the wall on Nercos."  
    "And I didn't like crossing that, either." she retorted. The Doctor smiled and rolled his legs over the top.  
    "Here we are, then. Over and upward." he said a touch too brightly. He reached across the crumbling stone fence and offered her his hands. Peri braced her hands on his shoulders and tried to find a solid foothold on the wall. The one the Doctor had used was no good, her legs couldn’t quite reach it, but after a moment she found another, swallower, but enough for her to hoist herself on top of the wall. Almost immediately, the Doctor adjusted his grip and lowered her down.  
    “There. It’s comparably clear from here to the house.”  
    “Clear?” Peri asked disbelievingly. Vines and lichen spread out from the house, thinning slightly only in that it gave way to larger shrubs and trees.  
    “Compare it to the other side of the wall. There are no large trees, and even the shrubbery is thin and only up to our knees. Why, the two of us could walk abreast if we so chose.” said the Doctor, although he felt slightly less sure of this assessment the longer he spoke. It was at this point that Peri noticed that she was still standing with her feet between the Doctor’s and holding onto his arms, but if he wasn’t going to comment on it, neither would she.  
    It soon became academic, however, as he took a step away from Peri and turned towards the house. It was more likely to be dangerous than the wilderness around them, which was probably what had attracted the Doctor's attention.  
    "Shall we?" The Doctor offered his elbow, which Peri took with only a slight roll of her eyes. It was typical of him, walking into a wrecked building with the air of a gentleman going on a Sunday walk. The pair of them set out through the underbrush.  
    "The sun is setting." Peri commented idly.  
    "Suns." the Doctor corrected. "The first one set before we landed. This planet has a rather short night, it's likely you'll see the first sun rise again before we leave. Suns, Peri. Plural."  
    Peri made a face and mouthed the word "suns" bitterly, but the Doctor wasn't looking at her.

    After crossing the fence, it was a matter of moments before they reached the house.  
    The door had fallen off the top hinge and hung stiffly, almost but not quite closed. Lichen climbed up the walls, a network of dry vines snaked across the porch, finding a new life on the walls and sprouting leaves. Ferns crept out of the broken windows. He pressed the door open, and the single hinge protested loudly as it swung open. It wasn't until this point that Peri realised they had both stopped talking, which was unusual.  
    The room inside was clearly grand at one point, with a large curved staircase with broken balusters sweeping into the foyer. A shattered chandelier, now covered entirely in an ivy-like vine, lay in pieces on the ground where it had fallen from the water-stained ceiling, and sheet-covered furniture clung to the walls of the front room, whose paint had cracked and fallen, leaving strange patterns. More lichen was climbing up the far wall and small white flowers, similar to daisies but much smaller, were growing from between the floorboards furthest from the windows.  
    "Careful of the floor, Peri." said the Doctor. "It could well be rotten."

    As they moved into the foyer, the floorboards creaked but held beneath them. Their progress across the floor was marked by footprints in the yellow-white powder; which incidentally also showed that Peri was making about three steps to each of the Doctor’s strides.       
    At first, they thought it was covered in a thick layer of dust, but on closer inspection, it was clear that near the windows, at least, the dust was comprised of alternating house dirt and yellow pollen that had blown in through the window. Peri suspected that if the dust was any thicker, or if she had a very good magnifying glass, Peri could check for strata of pollen versus decayed wood and see how many seasons had passed since the house was occupied.  
      
    “So, Doctor…” said Peri, moving towards the far wall. “Can I take a cutting?”  
    “I don’t know, _can you_?” he replied, examining one of the sheeted pieces of furniture.  
    “ _I can_ ,” she said, rolling her eyes, “But it’s up to you if I can take it on board the Tardis.”  
    “Just… let me look at the plants before you take them on board, all right Peri?” he asked, pinching the bridge of his nose. She smiled, clearly satisfied with herself.  
    Peri treaded carefully at first, wary of the floorboards creaking beneath her. But as she drew nearer to the flowers, the scent enticed her to move a little faster. It wasn't a sweet scent, but a clean one like cut grass. The young woman knelt by the plant and tugged her satchel around to the front of her body to pull out her mounting book and a pair of snips.

    Meanwhile, the Doctor had turned away to explore one of the doorways to his left. The door itself was gone, only rusted hinges suggesting that it had ever been there in the first place. He touched the doorframe as he passed through it, pressing gently and testing the wood. It looked nearly soft enough that his grip should have left a mark, but the frame held. That was comforting. The last thing he wanted was the house to collapse on them. He turned his interest to the room beyond. It was, more properly it _had_ been a study or library.

    There was something both quietly terrifying and bittersweet about the state of the books. One of the shelves which lined the walls had collapsed, spilling books into a small pile with spread across the floor. This continued to cover much of the room as even the shelves which hadn't fallen apart with time had scattered their books across the floor with their pages falling out. Moss and small sprouts, narrow shafts of fungi bloomed over the split pages.  
    There was something dreadfully morbid about the ruined books that distracted the Doctor from the rest of the room for several moments. A large bay window faced the front of the house, most of it's panes missing and all that remained cracked. The ivy-like plant had crept in through the broken panes and continued through the room beyond. If anything was being kept outside, it was not the window's doing but rather the mess of vines that has grown across it, casting a yellow-green light into the room that caught the dust whenever the Doctor moved.  
    And there was a great deal of that. There was more of that mixture of dust and pollen covering the room, making all the sharp angles of cracked furniture and rotting books seem somewhat softer. A desk stood in front of the window, obviously angled so that whoever sat their could write by as much daylight as the forest would permit to pass. It's chair had fallen onto its side, the cover moulding and rotting away and one leg snapped off entirely. The paint had cracked off the walls, showing water-stained plaster beneath and leaving tiny green flecks that grew denser  toward the floor. Some small, flying insects took to the air as the Doctor moved further into the room.  
    Most striking about this entire scene was the desk.There were sheets of paper placed beneath an object d'art, a cracked glass globe with a flattened bottom. A cup left on a saucer, now empty except for the yellow dust and webs, possibly left by insects similar to those the Doctor had disturbed, but so long ago they were thick with that ever-present dust. A large, leatherbound book, much like a ledger, was left open on the desk.  
    Compared to the rest of the room it was orderly, and looked rather as if someone had been working there and had to leave suddenly, unable to return for quite some time, the Doctor couldn't imagine it being less than five years.This was somewhat distressing. The front room had been closed properly, the furniture moved to the walls and covered with white sheets. The Doctor frowned, worried.

    Peri wiped sap onto her shorts.  
She'd taken some notes on the plant's growing conditions and was fairly pleased with them. Cool, shaded, tightly spaced; growing from a dark soil. She supposed the fact that she hadn't seen any outside the house suggested it either fed best on rotting wood or very much liked the shade. She'd left room in the centre of the page to mount the flower once it was pressed, and arranged the plant as best she could in tissue paper and set it on the books open pages.  
    This was always the hardest part. She snapped the book closed and pressed the covers firmly together, grunting slightly as she worked. Peri didn't think grunting helped the process much, but somehow it made her feel better to acknowledge she was actually exerting herself. After a moment, she loosened her grip and let the pages fall open. It was best to arrange the plant while it was crushed but still soft enough to be pliable, trying to make it recognisable as the same plant while it was alive. These flowers were small, with few petals arranged along the outside like a daisy, so it flatted fairly well; although a few petals had bent.  
    Peri had only a moment to be satisfied with her work. As she watched, the flower rose from the page, slowly straightening it's stem and turning the bloom towards the weak light. Then, much quicker by comparison, roots spread from the cut stem and rooted fast in the pages of the book, cutting through paper and previous samples. Once the plant had taken hold, new stems and leaves sprang from the the pages, curling tendrils and new buds bursting into new flowers and spreading past the pages.  
    Peri gasped and pulled away from the blooming book, dropping it as the fronds reached for her. It fell and slid across the other plants for a few inches, then curling tendrils began to root the book in place. There was a moment, entirely too long for her taste and still only a few seconds where she simply stared at the book in horror.  
    Peri spun on her heel and ran for the library.  
    " _Doctor!_ "


	2. A Quartet of Crickets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor dismisses Peri's concerns and they explore the house further, finding a beautiful form of insect life.

The Doctor picked his way through the loose papers and books on the floor, trying to step on as few as he could manage. It proved impossible to avoid them entirely, as they covered the floor. Even the places he thought were safe, covered in moss and leaves, proved to have more slippery papers under them. The cool dampness faded towards the windows, where the powdery cream mixture of pollen and dust had settled thickly over the furniture.

The desk in particular had caught his attention, with its abandoned cup and open ledger. He moved delicately through the room, looking sadly at the ruined chair for a moment before turning his full attention to the book itself. The thick, yellowish layers of dust and pollen covered the pages so entirely that he could only just see that there was writing on the page beneath it. Carefully, as if entranced by the incongruity, his hand moved toward the page.

 

" _Doctor!_ " Peri screamed.

He span about in place, drawing away from the desk. Peri had run into the room, she didn't have her satchel with her and she was clearly frightened. It was always distressing to see her in that state, which rather made him wish she didn't frighten quite so easily.

"What are you shrieking about?" he demanded. Aloud, the question lacked the tender concern it had in his head. Still, it got the general idea across. She stared at him for a moment, biting her lip.

"It's the plants, Doctor. I tried to mount a cutting-- and--" Peri shook her head violently. "Doctor, something _weird_ is going on here!"

"Precisely what I thought, Peri!" he agreed, gesturing with an extended finger. "You must have a look at what I've found."

"But Doctor-"

"Look at this room, Peri." He moved further into the centre of the room. "It's covered in more of that dust--pollen-- that we saw in the foyer." The Doctor wiped the surface of one of the shelves with a single forefinger, inspecting the dust carefully for a moment, then wrinkling his nose and rubbing the dirt away with a distasteful expression.

"And the plants, like in the front room." she agreed, following him. "They aren't like Earth plants, not quite, but there's similarities. I mean, more than I've seen on other planets." Peri gripped the sleeve of his jacket.

"Doctor, the plants-"

"Just a minute, Peri, some of these books look familiar. ‘Theoretical Quantum Adjustments’, ‘Chrononautical Reality Bubbles’, and this-” He lifted the ledger from the desk, leaving a large dark square where the cracked lacquer of the surface was revealed.

The Doctor blew the dust from the book's pages, directly into the face of his friend.

"That's not funny." Peri coughed, waving her hands to clear the cloud.

“It’s all a matter of perspective.” he replied idly, though the smile he directed towards the pages betrayed his tone. His eyes scanned the page rapidly.

Peri coughed again and rather wished she had a handkerchief. That stupid pollen had gone right up her nose. And, of course, the Doctor was not listening to her.

“Now what’s all this about?” the Doctor mused, running his finger gently along the page. “ _The instability grows, the grand chamber has been cut off, forced to move to the second-best chamber. … saw Dr. Kartz, which is worrying as he hasn’t visited in three months_ … Peri, stop coughing, I’m trying to read. The ink’s faded rather badly, I can’t quite make out the next part. I think it’s something about… ‘ _neoglyphs’? Neoglyphs on the panelling?_ I think that’s what it says. This man’s handwriting is terrible. It looks like a man’s handwriting. And probably a doctor’s. Doctors tend to have terrible handwriting…”

“Yeah, I’d noticed.” Peri agreed. The Doctor stopped reading to give Peri a rather pointed look. She smiled as sweetly as she could manage, then coughed again. The Doctor pulled a handkerchief monogrammed with a red question mark out of his pocket and handed it to Peri. She held it to her mouth and tried to hold in the next cough. The effort of holding her breath made her light-headed for a moment, but the feeling quickly passed.

“I _am_ sorry about the dust, Peri, but you needn’t be so theatrical.” he sighed. The Doctor adjusted the book in his hands and turned the page.

“… _my cat is missing… I fear she may have found a stray temporal zone... Kartz is dead… the attic is lost... Kartz visited again, same as before…”_

“Are any of the entries dated?” Peri asked, leaning in to look over the Doctor’s arm.

“Yes, but I think he’s writing the date in the American style, the order isn’t quite right… Or he skipped around a great deal. Some entries aren’t dated at all.” He flipped forward a few pages.

“It was open to the last entry, I think whoever was writing this expected to come back to it.” The Doctor sighed. “Which I already had inferred from the cup.”

“What was the last entry?”

“More of the same, instability in his work… instability in _his writing._ ” He added the last part as if the tone of the writing personally offended him. “There are several references to a Dr. Kartz, a colleague of the writer, as best as I can tell.”

“Do you know of a Dr. Kartz?”

“That’s just the trouble, Peri. I know of several.” said the Doctor, closing the ledger. Another, smaller cloud of dust puffed into the air and dissipated.

“Well, Peri.” he said, frowning slightly. “I had rather hoped that the ledger would shed some light on this spottily abandoned house, however dusty that light might have been. This only deepens the mystery.”

“This probably isn’t going to help, but there’s more than that.”

“There always is.” said the Doctor distractedly, thumbing through the earlier entries. If his expression was any indication, they were singularly unhelpful.

“I was out in the front hall-“

“It’s called a foyer, Peri.”

“Whatever, that’s not the point.” she grumbled. “I had just taken a cutting of some of those flowers near the staircase, the white ones.”

“Oh, no one cares about your blasted art collection!” the Doctor snapped suddenly. “Go on, Peri; it’s just the writer keeps making pointless notes about what ‘priceless’ arrangement of found objects he’s purchased.”

“Doctor, you could at least _pretend_ to pay attention!”

“Oh, I am.” he answered idly. Peri frowned and placed her hands on her hips. She wondered if reaching the climax of her story, the part where she was in danger, would make him feel sorry about not paying attention.

“Anyway, I closed my mounting book on it to press it, but-“

"Hm? You shut it in the book? Why didn't you put it in a flower press?" he asked idly, not looking up.

"…because I don't have a flower press? Doctor-"

"Really? I must get you one." he said distractedly.

“Never mind that. I had taken a cutting of the white flowers, and I tried to press it, however unorthodox I was about it, but that’s not the point… that’s when it got weird.”

“How would you know weird if you saw it?” the Doctor mused. “The life we lead…”

“How will you know weird if you don’t let me finish a damn sentence?!” she shrieked.

He looked up suddenly, as if what Peri had been saying finally registered.

"Why don't you have a flower press?" he asked. "You'll have a devil of a time mounting flowers without one." Peri rolled her eyes.

"I _know_ , I was just doing that." she frowned. "Or _trying_ to. Anyway, I have one back at my dorm, but that's not the point-"

"You really ought to have taken it with you, then. True, I did acquire that mounting paper and the book for you, but if you already had a mounting press when you came aboard, you ought to have-"

"Where was I going to put it?" she demanded. "Doctor, I'm trying to tell you something!"

"Then tell me, dear girl, and stop prattling on about your flower press! I'll get you a new one at the earliest opportunity." he said sharply. "There is a far more urgent matter at hand."

“Doctor, when I opened the book, the flower _sprouted_ and rooted into the page! All of the plants in my mounting book started to bloom, I think, and those are dead. They just sprang back to life and the creepers tried to grab me.”

“Something attacked you?” the Doctor asked suddenly. “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you mention this sooner?”

Peri looked quite ready to slap him.

"You're not hurt, are you?" he asked, closing the book. She shook her head. The Doctor's expression of concern melted into a serene smile.

"Then my dear child, whatever are you complaining about? Do shut that mouth of yours for a moment; I need to think." He opened up the book again.

"Doctor!" Peri protested. He waved her away with an irritated tching in the back of his throat.

" _Doctor!_ " she repeated, louder.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

"I don't know, maybe the fact that a flower I just picked ate my book and tried to grab me just _might_ be related to the… funny business in that book?”

“Perhaps, but I’d quite like to figure out what the ‘funny business’ as you so acutely put it actually _is._ How am I to tell if the two matters are related if I don’t know what either is?”

“Of course,” Peri rolled her eyes, “Because I’ve never pointed something out to you that you’ve ignored, and then it turns out to be really important? How silly of me. I'll just _go back to my silly flowers_ and let you poke around the old books.” She finished this off with a rather nasty expression.

“Would you feel better if I went and looked at what the plants did?” he sighed wearily, closing the book.

“Yes!”

“Very well. Then I shall.” he smiled and patted Peri on the head. “Just as soon as I’ve finished up in here.”

" _Doctor!_ " she demanded.

“On the other hand, I could bend to your nagging and have a look at this plant you’re talking about.” The Doctor continued in the same tone as he started. The timelord returned the book to the desk.

“I would prefer, however if we were to go into the situation armed with as much information as we could manage to gather; as this house does appear to have been the centre of someone’s research. There might be something about your unusual flower in here. Could you help me do a quick check for any other handwritten books?” said the Doctor, shifting some leaves with his foot. Peri nodded and began hopping between tuffets of moss towards the shelf. This was probably the best she was going to get from him. Frankly she wasn’t entirely eager to go back and show the Doctor the last thing that tried to attack her, in fact she wouldn’t terribly mind not going back and getting grabbed at all. It was the fact he’d not cared about it that got her screaming at him.

She pushed aside a fuzzy-leaved sprout with the back of her arm. It brushed against the grain of her hair and made her feel as if a bug was crawling up it. She grimaced and rubbed the area, hard. It was unusual for her to be so jumpy, even given how the plants that ate her book had rattled her. She wasn’t sure why it had left her so nervous; given that a part of her felt she should be used to random things trying to grab her by now. And, she reminded herself, she should be used to the Doctor brushing aside her concerns. Something about the abandoned house had unnerved her, though. It was probably the quiet, the way that the dust and thick leaves muffled their footsteps and the delicate architecture of faded wood and thick webbing inspired the two usually verbal travellers to near silence. A fine layer of the dust was beginning to settle on their clothing, particularly around the Doctor’s spats and Peri’s ankles. She felt she should have expected more dew on the leaves, but even the leaves had a thin dusting of dry pollen. Maybe that was it. The greenery was so lush and the air was so dry. Dry and cool, good for storing food but not for growing plants. It just felt wrong. Or perhaps it was the fact she _almost_ recognized so many of these plants, but none of them were quite close enough to make an identification.

"Are you sure none of these plants are toxic?" Peri asked.

"I'm sure that you've got more sense than to pop an unidentified leaf in your mouth and find out." the Doctor replied coolly. He moved to the next bookshelf.

“Something about that art installation the author of the journal referenced reminded me of someone…” the Doctor muttered, frowning. “If I could only remember who…”

Peri pouted with worry. There was an excellent chance that the Doctor had some rare information that would prove invaluable to their search. Whether or not he remembered it before it became a moot point was another matter entirely. He abandoned his search, placing a book on the end of a long-empty, crooked shelf. It slid along the slanted length and ended tidily in the corner. The Doctor frowned and returned to the ledger he had left on the desk. He flipped to the flyleaf of the journal.

“It would appear that this house was the residence and de facto laboratory of Dr. Reimer.”

“Dr. Reimer?” Peri repeated.

“Yes, the name does sound familiar.” He agreed. “The trouble is, when one get to be my age, one meets so many people they all start running together in one’s head. To make matters worse, it’s more than possible that names will repeat with time. I’ve travelled with two young women named Sarah, for example.”

Peri bit her lip and frowned. The name sounded familiar to her as well, but she couldn’t place it. Maybe it was someone they’d come across before. Maybe it was one of the many people who rather liked the idea of her tied to a rock awaiting some bloodthirsty monster to either eat or marry her. Maybe it was a name she read in some book before she’d even met the Doctor.

Peri moved to the other side of the room, hopping awkwardly over the split books. There was another door she'd missed at first, possibly because it was covered in spider webs. She assumed they were spider webs, at least. None of the plants she'd seen yet were quite like plants back on Earth, so it was probably not very likely that the insect—or rather, arachnid-- life was quite like the spiders back home.

Her first thought was that the network of old webs and dry vines reminded her of a lace curtain spread over the doorway, but as soon as she touched it, that idea disappeared. Lace didn’t tear and cling like that. She recoiled and pulled a face, rubbing her hand furiously on her shorts. Peri snapped a bit of dry vine off of a bookshelf and used it to break a hole through the web. The last thing she wanted was to get stuck and discover the web wasn’t quite as abandoned as she’d thought. It wasn’t likely that there was anything large and hungry in the empty house, but the odds being against it had never stopped her from joining an alien’s menu before.

 

Her first thought upon entering the room beyond the library was that it was originally a drawing room. Peri thought it was kind of silly to have a room dedicated to avoiding people; and suspected drawing rooms originally came from buildings with too many rooms for the people who lived here to use practically.

She then considered her life on the Tardis and how two people who were really quite fond of each other could use an almost infinite space. Having a designated spot for each person to sneak off to and sulk after arguments didn’t seem quite so silly after considering her life with the Doctor. Part of her wondered if she’d find one if she stormed off thinking about it after their next argument.

 

Peri moved towards the window, creeping between a pair of end tables, when she heard the sound of footsteps behind her. She turned her head, expecting from the sound of the footfalls to see the Doctor and was instead greeted with a large, honey-coloured bear lumbering slowly through the door.

"Peri?" it asked. The young woman cried out and stumbled back, knocking against an end table. A vase atop it wobbled in place for a moment, then fell to the dusty ground and shattered. She snapped her eyes shut at the noise, just for a moment, and when they opened, there was no bear. The Doctor stood there, looking at her with concern.

"Did I startle you?"

"Startle‽" she demanded. She opened her mouth to lay into him, but thought better of it. She shook her head violently and rubbed her eyes. As he moved towards her, the Doctor’s expression mated calculating and concern. Perhaps it was because he felt guilty for dismissing her last distress. Perhaps it was that she never looked frightened by _him_ without reason. Perhaps it was that Peri deciding not to shout at him was just weird. Whatever the combination of reasons, his companion had suddenly become far more interesting than the abandoned house.

“You’re frightened.”

“I thought I saw—it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s never stopped you from talking before. Tell me what you saw.”

The Doctor took each of Peri’s hands in his own and forced them down to waist level so she’d stop rubbing her eyes. His thumbs drew circles on the backs of her hands, which was intended to calm her but was probably doing more to soothe him.

“Something’s wrong.” said Peri.

“Clearly.” the Doctor agreed.

“I mean there’s something wrong with me.” Peri bit her lip with worry. “I’m hallucinating, I must be.”

“But you’re not delirious.” he continued. “In fact, except for your distress you seem perfectly normal. And even your distress is accounted for.”

“It’s perfectly normal to freak out if you think you’re hallucinating, you mean?”

“Peri, we can’t be sure that you’re hallucinating if we can’t compare what you are sensing to reality. As I said, how would you know weird when you saw it?” The Doctor looked at her intensely, clearly worried and clearly _not_ a bear. “Peri, what did you see?”

“Just now, or the first time I saw something weird?”

“Well, I wasn’t present for the first instance so I can’t compare our experiences. Start with what you saw just now.”

Peri gathered herself, still not entirely sure she wasn’t being patronised, and started into her story with her usual intensity and volume. Either the Doctor finally listening to her or the sound of her own voice seemed to perk her up.

“I was coming to look at the window when I heard you following me. I turned around to talk to you, but you weren’t there. I know you were really, but I didn’t see you.”

Peri dropped the Doctor’s hand and gestured towards the door.

“I saw a bear, right where you were standing. I mean, it’s not like it could have been a trick of the light or my mind just saying, ‘oh, that’s bear-shaped it must be a bear’; I saw all these little details—it was shaggy around the neck, and the teeth were _huge_ , I noticed that first—and it was shaped wrong, and all yellowy-gold. I can’t have just seen you and thought all that.” 

“Also, I don’t particularly look like a bear.” the Doctor said curtly. Peri smiled.

“I don’t know, Doctor, has no one compared you to a big cuddly teddy bear before?”

“You have.” he answered curtly. “When you wanted to get a rise out of me.”

“I—I just don’t know, I was so sure I saw it until I blinked.”

“And you’re sure that there’s no bear now.” the Doctor finished.

“Doctor, the thing was bigger than you and right where you were standing.” Peri sighed, turning back towards the centre of the room. “It’s not like it could have hid behind a bookcase.”

 

They turned their attention back to the room. The level of destroyed beauty was the same in this room as the two before it, though there weren’t as many books ripped on the ground. The furniture looked largely decorative, spindly end tables and couches with ripped upholstery. On the wall opposite the windows there was a framed portrait of what they could only assume was a young humanoid girl, but a flowering vine had eaten through the canvas where her face would have been and crawled out to grip at the carved frame. There was something ironic about the fact live plants were growing on the acanthus moulding, but most of the canvas itself was either destroyed or covered by leaves and conical periwinkle blossoms; as the plant had crawled directly out of the girl’s face, leaving a black-rimmed hole where her head had been and covering the painting with vines. All that was clear from among the trailing vines was a pair of youthful hands folded on a delicate skirt.

Peri regarded the remains of the painting uneasily and turned away from it with a shudder. Even the bear was preferable to that. Peri frowned. She was so sure that she had seen a bear. For the moment that she saw it the beast had been as clear as the doorway in which it stood. As clear as that painting which she was trying to put from her mind. She turned to the Doctor.

“Doctor, do you think that… I don’t know, a hologram or something might have flashed up for a minute and that’s what I saw?” Peri asked.

“I would have thought that most technology would have degraded past usefulness by now, just judging by the state of the house.” said the Doctor thoughtfully. “But I also would think we would have seen the remains of electronics by now. Three rooms in, and not so much as a light switch, which is absurd in the colonies. I suppose they must have hidden them as to not interfere with the historical design of the room, but even so I’d imagine I’d have found one by now.” The Doctor shook his head and frowned slightly.

“What nature of research, particularly in the field of time travel, could be done without wiring?” he mused.

“Time travel?” Peri repeated.

“Good heavens, Peri, what did you think all those books in the study were about?” he asked, “You’re a clever enough girl, you should have figured out the field of research of Dr. Reimer—I _know_ I know a Dr. Reimer— from the titles. He was trying to figure out time travel. Of course Earth, and by extension its colonies, didn’t work out time travel until the Dalek Wars.”

“Earth had time travel?” Peri asked.

“Briefly, before the Timelords started regulating it.” The Doctor rolled his eyes. “They almost immediately wound up nearly killing the people who would have made a unified Earth possible. There’s nothing quite like a brilliant scientific invention in the hands of a government to completely knacker a planet.”

“Okay, if time travel’s so dangerous, why do you do it?”

“For goodness sake, Peri! You’re American aren’t you? You lot know guns are dangerous but you keep using them because you think ‘it’s alright for me to have power, _I’m_ not going to misuse it’.”

“Thanks for assuming all Americans are gun-toting hypocrites.”

“Well, you just insinuated that Timelords hoard a power capable of destroying the universe over all other races!”

“I insinuated it, you’ve _actually_ said it.” Peri defended. “Whenever they come up in conversation.”

“And I was right, but that’s completely different. I’m a Timelord.”

“So I’m not allowed to make judgements about Gallifreyans because I’m not from Gallifrey.”

“That _is_ the general idea, yes.” he answered dryly. He frowned again.

“It’s going to drive me positively barmy until I figure out if _this_ Dr. Reimer is one of the Dr. Reimers I’ve met.”

“Drive?” Peri asked with a false sweetness. He cocked an eyebrow at her. Turning her attention back to the room, Peri frowned thoughtfully.

“That’s the weird thing, Doctor.” Peri mused, “I think _I_ know a Dr. Reimer.”

“Peri, we’re some millennia after your time, I’m fairly sure whoever you’ve met they are long dead by now.”

“Unless they actually _did_ figure out time travel.” she pointed out coldly.

“Which would have been awfully difficult in an unwired house.” said the Doctor. He frowned thoughtfully. Peri nodded. She’d never really thought about what powered the Tardis before, but she’d seen him tear circuits out of the roundels and rewire them, using his sonic lance like a soldering gun. If it wasn’t electricity, it behaved like it enough that she could convince herself that had some idea what he was talking about.

“This isn’t answering our questions at all.” the Doctor frowned. “If there is no wiring, you couldn’t have seen a hologram. Besides, if you had seen a hologram, I should have seen _something_ from the other side, even if it wasn’t your bear.”

“Is there anything that _could_ make me see something you couldn’t?”

“A psychic projection, perhaps?” the Doctor mused. “A direct tap into your mind, a second entity trying to enter our timeline through your body-”

“Or I’m hallucinating.” Peri finished.

“That is a distinct possibility, yes.” the Doctor admitted.

“Wow, Doc, you managed to think up some things _worse_ than hallucinating.” Peri grumbled, wrinkling her nose. The Doctor scowled. He knew she’d purposely called him “doc” because he had scared her and that she was counting on his gentlemanly nature not to retaliate while she was upset.

 

The pair moved deeper into the room. Peri checked how rotten a brocade couch was before slowly kneeling on it getting a closer look at a vine climbing down the wall from a hole near the ceiling.

The Doctor investigated a tiffany lamp, which was missing some panes, and while he found a pull chain, pulling it only resulted in a quiet clicking noise. Even if this room had been wired at one point, there was nothing powering it any longer.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” the Doctor frowned. “If one room was wired, why were the others not?”

“Maybe they didn’t get to it yet?” Peri suggested. “If they abandoned the house while they were still working on it, then not all of the house _would_ have been wired. That could also explain why there were all those white sheets over the furniture in the first room.”

“An excellent thought, Peri.” the Doctor admitted, “You _have_ been learning from me.” He turned and undulated himself onto the couch, taking up all of the room Peri was not in her kneeling position on the other end.

“One enigma follows another, Peri.” he frowned. “If the house is unwired except for this room, what did this lamp connect to?”

“I’m still more concerned about the fact I’m hallucinating.” Peri said tersely.

“We still don’t-” the Doctor began, but the expression on Peri’s face silenced him. She sank fully onto the seat, turning slightly so that she was now facing the window with her back to the Doctor. He let out a resigned sigh.

“I’m afraid I can’t say why it is you just saw a bear, my dear.” the Doctor admitted. Peri wrapped her arms around her knees. He frowned with concern and adjusted his position on the couch.

“…but if I’m hallucinating, then did I really see a plant root itself in my book?” she asked quietly. The Doctor wrapped his arm around Peri’s shoulders and she leaned into his side.

“I’m more concerned about the fact it doesn’t seem to have affected me.” murmured the Doctor thoughtfully, turning his face into her hair. “If you were contaminated by something and I haven’t, then it must have been during the brief period we separated.”

“Or when you blew that weird spore into my face.” Peri smiled cynically.

“Ah, yes.” he admitted sheepishly. He brushed a lock of hair over her ear. “But that wouldn’t account for the blooming cutting. That happened before you inhaled that pollen, so either whatever’s disturbing your senses took hold while we separated or the unusual plant was perfectly real. Which situation do you find preferable?”

“Gee, Doctor, how can I choose? They’re both such great choices.” Peri grumbled, sliding her hand up her arm to touch his. He interwove his fingers with hers and considered the wisdom of taking a moment to cuddle in an abandoned house on a strange planet. Weighed against a distressed Peri, the opportunity to cuddle, and his general attitude to safe behaviour in uncertain situations; he concluded this was the only reasonable course of action. He smiled slightly and inhaled the scent off her neck. Unless he was mistaken, which the Doctor very much doubted given that he was the Doctor and by that token terribly observant, familiar with Peri and very rarely mistaken; Peri had a different perfume today. It was floral, but distilled and not the same cool, earthy mixture of night-blooming flowers that permeated the house. That smell was definitely coming off her and not the plants.

“Hey, Doctor?” Peri asked.

“Yes?”

“It occurs to me that if the pollen on the book is what’s making me hallucinate, it’s probably caught in my hair.” The Doctor stiffened and drew away from his friend.

“Ah. Yes. But, as I just said, it’s quite possible that you started hallucinating before you breathed that in, so we haven’t any proof that the pollen is the cause at all.” He rose to his feet and straightened his coat nervously. Peri shifted into a more comfortable position on the end of the couch.

“If you see anything odd, tell me immediately so I can establish whether or not it exists.”

“What if you start hallucinating?” she asked.

“Then I’ll be seeing something other than what you are and we’ll still know something’s wrong.” he answered confidently.

“Doctor, if we both start hallucinating—” Peri began.

“Then, _and not before_ , we will return to the Tardis with our questions unanswered.”

“Really?” Peri asked, with a mixture of hope and surprise. It was unheard of for the Doctor to leave a mystery unsolved just because she was upset, particularly given the way he had blown her off in the study.

“Yes. And not return until we were sensible, this time with breathing filters.” he finished decisively. Peri rolled her eyes and sighed.

“What?” the Doctor asked.

“I thought maybe we’d just leave, that’s all.”

“Leave?” the Doctor repeated. “Leave? _Leave?!_ ”

“Doctor, there is something really weird about this place and it’s freaking me out.”

“You needn’t have alerted me to either of those points, Peri, they are both perfectly evident on their own.” said the Doctor. “Which is why I would like to sort out precisely what is happening as quickly as possible.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be much use if I’m seeing weird bears and stuff.” Peri protested coldly. “What if whatever’s making me see these things is doing some lasting damage? We don’t even know how it’s affecting you.”

“We don’t even know _if_ it’s affecting me.” the Doctor corrected. He frowned at her. “And you were so keen on exploring this planet. I’m disappointed.”

“Disappointed?” Peri asked. A slight edge was forming on her voice, the Doctor had twelve seconds to ameliorate and keep her from screaming at him.

“There are so many unanswered questions!” he exclaimed, preparing to pontificate on his observations like a detective in an old film, “Why was this house abandoned? Why was the foyer closed and the study abandoned with a used cup of tea and an open ledger? Why did we find no evidence of any sort of power until the drawing room? Was this house unwired? But if the house is unwired except for this room, what did this lamp connect to? What has caused you to experience such unusual sights and why hasn’t it affected me?”

He’d blown his chance.

“Doctor, I’m as curious as you, but how do we know that whatever’s making me hallucinate isn’t eating my brain or something?” Peri demanded, balling her fists.

“Why, because this dull interest is precisely what I would expect of you, of course.”

“Oh, if you want to want to call me ‘dull-witted’ or whatever flowery insult to my intelligence you’ve got, don’t mince your words and say it! But say it where we’re sure I’m not getting a brain tumour!”

“You are almost certainly not getting a brain tumour.” the Doctor responded sharply. “I merely was looking forward to seeing more of your intellectual side.”

“Because you’re sick of dealing with dumb Peri?”

“Perpugilliam, I think we both know I am quite harsh enough with you without you attributing insults to me which I have never voiced!” the Doctor snapped. He gritted his teeth. These were the first rumblings of what would probably be quite a nasty fight.

“Oh? Never voiced?” she laughed humourlessly. “Have you thought them?”

“Peri!” he snapped. Peri’s face started to sneer as she opened her mouth to continue the argument, but it suddenly twitched into a different expression. Her head cocked slightly, clearly trying to either remember something or focus on something on the edge of her perception. The Doctor’s frustration was once again replaced with concern.

“Peri?” he asked softly.

“I think it’s starting again…” she whimpered, touching her forehead.

“What is it you’re seeing?” the Doctor asked, bending down slightly to look her in the eyes. “If you describe it to me precisely, I’ll be able to tell you if it’s real.”

"I’m not _seeing_ anything, it’s--do I hear crickets?" Peri asked earnestly.

"...no..." said the Doctor, moving towards the window. "But something similar, I think. Have a look at this, Peri." She joined her friend and pushed what she thought was a dusty lace curtain away, although it turned out to be an insect's web.

"Yuck." she grumbled, rubbing her hand on her shorts.

"That's what you always say when I've found something lovely." the Doctor said idly, still examining the window. The twilight had deepened, apparently the Doctor was right about night falling fast on this planet, and now the light filtering into the undergrowth had lessened and taken on a faint lavender hue. The shadows were longer and darker than when they had entered the house. Now Peri noticed the clean sweet scent of mixed flowers more acutely. Either some of it was coming in through the windows, or the visual cue of the lush undergrowth brought the scent to her attention. It was sweeter than it had been in the foyer, suggesting a different balance of plants.

Peri noticed that largely small flowering bushes, with small clusters of almost-white Alice-blue flowers and large feathery fronds, dominated the brush. Part of her wanted to investigate them closer, and another part of her remembered the flower that consuming her mounting book too acutely to want to try again any time soon.

The cricket-like sound continued, but now that she was listening to it closely, it was clear that they were not Earth insects. It was far more rhythmic, almost musical but not quite. It was clearly an organic sound, like a cricket or a cicada. The longer she listened to it, the more clear it became and Peri began to wonder why it was that she hadn’t noticed it before.

The final thing she noticed about this scene was a series of tiny, greenish cyan lights flickered gently amongst the leaves. The colour threw her off for a moment, but then she realised what they looked like.

"Are those fireflies?" she asked.

"No." the Doctor said quietly, touching the cracked glass pane. Her eyes followed the point the long, graceful finger indicated and saw that one of the insects had landed on the window glass. It wasn’t the most flattering angle for any insect, but it drew her attention to the anatomy. Up close, the insect didn’t quite look like a cricket or a firefly, none of the proportions were right for either. The hind legs seemed to run over ridged wing casings to create the noise. When the striped wing cases were closed, the light from their glowing abdomen was cut off. Apparently the bugs could not glow and sing at the same time, but Peri didn’t know enough about the life cycle of this nameless insect to think of a reason why they would need to. The insects didn’t appear to have a neck, but the antennae swept back the length their entire bodies. The particular one she was watching spread it’s wings and flashed its green light at her.

Peri’s eyes ran back along their original path and lingered on the Doctor’s hand for moment. Detached from the context of being attached to the man she was usually arguing with, Peri had no hesitation in thinking how attractive his hands were. To be perfectly fair, she rarely felt hesitation in thinking that so much as resentment; that he was arrogant and sanctimonious but possessed graceful hands and a striking profile.

With a somewhat sheepish effort, Peri drew her focus to encompass the entire scene: flowers, shadows, trees, cobwebs, flashing insects with their quiet song, the carved windowpanes in graceful decay, vines trailing their leaves across stained wallpaper and the Doctor thoughtfully gazing out of the window.

"It's beautiful." Peri murmured.

"It's _all_ beautiful." the Doctor agreed. "Pity half of it’s destroying the other half. Oh well, I suppose that's just the cycle of history. Progress destroys nature, nature progress."


	3. The Silverware Swims

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Peri find the abandoned house's conservatory and investigate the trees that caused Peri's symptoms. There, they discovery Peri's perceptions are not the only thing behaving abnormally.

A breeze ruffled the underbrush, disturbing the singing glowbugs and making the flowers dip, before coming in through the window and lifting the torn cobwebs from the window frame. Peri stepped back to avoid getting a faceful of the dusty web. She was feeling a good deal calmer now and felt mainly annoyed that she was not able to be entirely sure if what she was seeing was real or not, and that she had allowed herself to get that distressed about it. Really, she had seen things as strange as weird talking bears and fast-growing plants before; and this time she wasn’t even really seeing them, so what was she getting upset about? Oh yes, that was it. She wasn’t really seeing it. It wasn’t even as if she could make a firm judgement that things that made no sense weren’t real and things that did make sense were, given that in most scenarios she put singing glowbugs and dried plants coming to attacking her on the same level. And besides, strictly speaking, nothing she had seen in hallucinations or otherwise was any more unusual than what she usually encountered since she had started travelling with the Doctor.

 

Something else caught Peri’s attention. It was a ringing noise, but not like tinnitus. It sounded a bit like the scattered ringing of bells, almost but not quite melodic. It probably wouldn’t be so strange if it wasn’t being heard just beyond the glowbugs, which were also almost in tune.

She was glad for the moment she took to calm herself. She didn’t think that she _would_ have broken down if she was still worrying about the hallucinations before she heard the ringing; but she was glad she didn’t have the opportunity to be proven wrong. Now that she had stopped and listened for it for a moment, she was sure that there was another noise blending with the glowbug’s chirruping, something a bit higher and more melodic. It sounded like—well, it sounded a bit like a music box, but Peri was fairly sure that wasn’t what it was. The Doctor watched her shifting expression curiously.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s the fact that asking you to confirm every little thing I’m seeing or not seeing is real or entirely in my head is _already_ getting old.” Peri grumbled.

“I mean, what are you thinking about? It rather looks like you’re listening to that chiming noise, but I want to check.” Peri shrugged.

“Well, if you can hear a chime, then I guess that I’m not hallucinating.” she muttered. It sounded like rather a small favour at this point, but she would take what she could get. The Doctor straightened from where he had been leaning on the windowframe.

“Let’s see if we can find that chime, shall we?” he suggested. “Surely that will prove you’re quite alright.” Peri rolled her eyes and followed after him.

“I think it’s gonna take more than that, Doctor.”

 

The two of them left the drawing room, trying to stay quiet enough to hear that musical chiming over the glowbugs. The sound drew them through what appeared to have been a dining room before the chairs were stacked against the wall and covered with white sheets. There was significantly less flora in this room, and as they were not examining it as closely as the previous two, they passed through it much faster. The wainscoting and torn wallpaper were probably just as magnificent and as worn as the other rooms they had seen, but the light was too dim to make much of it. The room led them deeper into the house, further from any windows and by that token any natural light. They left doors open, letting what little dying sunlight could make it from the next room over into the next. The Doctor begun to feel around in his pocket for a flashlight, but thus far he’d only pushed past a handkerchief, a penknife and a packet of crisps.

“I’m growing rather weary of finding more mysteries when we search for answers.” said the Doctor irritably, “First the foyer, then the ledger, and now this chiming noise, why, I simply can’t-“

“Doctor-“ Peri hushed.

“Quiet, Peri, we’ll never hear the chime if you keep talking.” he interjected. Peri rolled her eyes and abandoned her objection. She suspected that another one would present itself soon enough.

 

A thin beam of light crept out from under the door at the end of the passage, coaxing them out of the dim dining room. What’s more, the sound grew louder as they approached the door. The Doctor entered the room first, and the thin green light filtering through the leaves seemed brilliant after the dark. He stopped abruptly, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and Peri nearly crashed into his back.

 

  Something about the scene was deeply unsettling, more so than just wandering through an abandoned house, but Peri couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe she was still a little jumpy. This room was a conservatory, or at least it had been before it had been abandoned. Now, the broken glass and empty copper pipes probably did very little to help the plants grow. They didn’t seem to need it, however, as several of what appeared to be potted fruit trees flourished and outgrew their pots, breaking the clay and thirstily snaking their roots across the floor. Peri supposed they were either fruit trees or trees bred for their flowers, as they were in full bloom, filling the conservatory with their sweet clean scent and heavy yellow pollen. Great roots cracked and snaked through the spotty panes that comprised the room. The caulk had rotted away from the frames in many places, in one case dropping an entire sheet of glass roof to the floor, where it now lay shattered and overgrown with moss on the tile. In the corner, a chipped porcelain sink with rusted fixtures dripped lazily onto a clutter of even more rusted trowels. While the light was quite clear and bright in comparison to the rooms they had just left, it was now clear to see that plants were growing up both sides of the glass, giving the whole room a shadowy feel, not as green as the forest outside but clear white sunlight that made all of the dusty plants seem less saturated.

Their eyes skimmed over all of this quickly before settling on the source of the noise. It had in fact been a wind chime, at least, neither of them could think of another reason for it to exist. The wind chime, such as it was, had been constructed out of a collection of mismatched silverware from a range of about a hundred years, some hung point-down by their handles and others spinning horizontally on the same threads, knocking against the other silverware to make that noise. The knives were positioned to look as if their spinning would cut the threads and send the whole mess down on the viewer. The Doctor wasn’t much impressed by it; he supposed it must have been part of that wretched art collection that had been mentioned so often in the journal.

 

Peri ran her fingers along the edge of a table, watching the furrows she carved into the dust. Immediately after, she rubbed her hand on her shorts and wondered why it was she’d thought that was a good idea in the first place. She sheepishly noticed that a yellowish smudge was forming on her shorts from all the times she wiped her hand on it, and if she kept it up much longer it might match her shirt.

“This is weird.” mused Peri. “Look at this pollen. It’s the same stuff we saw in the study and the front hall.”

“I thought it looked rather similar.” the Doctor agreed.

“I’m sure it’s from the same species of plant. It’s the same colour, the same texture, it smells the same.” she frowned. “But why are these in a greenhouse and those outside the house, if they’re the same plant?”

“I suppose either they spread into the greenhouse or out of it.” he mused.

“I wonder which one it was.” Peri commented.

“How does that matter?” the Doctor asked.

“Well, it doesn’t _as_ much if he was just growing them as a hobby and wanted the trees to bloom all year, but it seems weird to plant something that naturally grows in your climate in a conservatory unless you’re trying to control how it’s growing and I just thought, well, he’s doing all this research already, this sounds a lot like an experiment.”

“My word Peri, you certainly are starting to think scientifically.” the Doctor said proudly. “Just like me.”

“I hope not, two of you is enough as it is.”

“There’s six for now, but let’s not split hairs.” he replied. “Perhaps we ought to check from some chemicals or vials or something that suggests that the plants were being crossbred.”

“They wouldn’t need all that.” said Peri, checking the counters for drawers. “Most crossbreeding of trees is done with splicing or just selective seeding.”

“I don’t suppose we’d be able to discount that by examining the trees?” the Doctor asked.

“Well, if they were using splicing and seeding to grow a specific plant, we wouldn’t be able to tell by these, they look like at least second generation.” said Peri. “If they seeded the plants with features they wanted, we wouldn’t be able to tell because we don’t know what the original plants looked like or what features the people were breeding for. And if they were spliced, we’d need to see the original tree to look for scars. If these are second generation, we have no way of knowing. And _that’s_ assuming they were experimenting on trees at all!”

The Doctor stared at Peri with a mixture of admiration and dismay that she knew more about this subject than he did. Peri flashed a little smile and turned back to examining the room. He watched her appreciatively for a moment before focusing his own attention to see if there was any other information he could gather from the conservatory.

 

Given the fact it seemed so completely out of place in the relatively practical conservatory, and that it was the only source of noise in the house, the Doctor’s eyes kept being drawn to the wind chime.

“I must say, I don’t think much of their decorator.” the Doctor commented dryly.

“What, accenting plants with more plants?” Peri asked. “I guess that is overdoing it a bit…”

“I was thinking more of the Dadaistic Sword of Damocles wind chime, I’m sure that the conservatory was not quite in this state when they left it.” he commented, gesturing to the item in question. Peri turned her eyes to the wind chime.

The knives idly twirled in place, catching the light and knocking against spoons and letting out another quiet _ting_ every few seconds. Peri wasn’t sure if she preferred the silence.

"I don't like it." said Peri, hugging her arms. "It's creepy."

“Peri, don’t tell me that you’re getting frightened again, just after we’d calmed you down?”

“It’s not in your head!” Peri snapped. “You don’t have to double-guess everything you see and hear, and you don’t need to ask for help to just _make an observation_ , so you can stop acting like I’m overreacting!” The Doctor’s natural response to Peri yelling at him was to respond in kind, but in this case she clearly had a point. Rather than admit that out loud, he decided to drop the subject and awkwardly toyed with a curl behind his ear. She sighed and cast her eyes around the room.

 

“It’s weird, when I could hear those bugs that wind chime almost sounded like it had a tune, like…” Peri hummed a bar of a high, simple melody.

“Curious how it repeats itself after two bars.” the Doctor commented.

“Well, that’s all I’m hearing.” Peri shrugged. The Doctor smiled weakly and grabbed her arms as comfortingly as he could manage.

“Well, at least we have established that the ringing wasn’t in your head.”

“Great.” Peri rolled her eyes. “I’m still hallucinating, but at least it’s not tinnitus.”

“Ah, but the _noise_ wasn’t a hallucination!” he said brightly. “Until this point, all of the hallucinations have been visual, yes?”

Peri nodded. The focus of her eyes changed, and it was suddenly quite clear to the Doctor that whatever she was looking at, it was not he.

“Peri?” he asked. “Are you quite alright?”

“Spoons.” Peri said suddenly.

“Spoons?” the Doctor asked. “ _Spoons? Spoons?!_ What do you mean, ‘spoons’?” Peri’s eyes and mouth had all gone quite round with shock; and to respond she simply raised her hand, pointed at something behind the Doctor and emphatically repeated herself.

“ _Spoons!_ ”

 

As the Doctor whirled about in a flash of brilliant fabric, Peri considered the fact that if she hadn’t been so startled she might have been a bit more articulate.

The flashing, ringing chime had caught her attention again, and as she watched the spoons twirl in place, their metallic forms seemed to shift and reform as if they were melting, turning into small sharks and proceeding to swim through the air. Even given the unusual sights she had seen with the Doctor, she was fairly comfortable identifying that as a hallucination. The worried expression the Doctor had when he turned back around, and the fact it was very much directed at her and not the sharks, confirmed this.

“I take it there’s something wrong with the spoons?” he asked cautiously. Peri dug the heels of her palms into her eye sockets.

“No, they’re fine! The spoons are a little freaky but fine! They’ve got to be happy, that’s why they started swimming away!”

“Are you quite alright, Peri?”

“I’m fine!” she snapped. “I’m fine, and when I open my eyes again, there aren’t going to be any sharks swimming around the room!” The Doctor frowned with concern and rubbed Peri’s shoulder.

“This is clearly very trying on your nerves, Peri.” he murmured gently. Peri lowered her hands and exposed an expression that suggested that she _had_ rolled her eyes when they were covered.

“I can’t imagine why.” she snarked. The Doctor ruffled his hair sheepishly and broke off the contact. Peri moved away from the tables, trying her best to ignore the sharks and figure out if she could find _anything_ useful in the conservatory. This would of course be made harder by he fact she was unsure if anything she was seeing was actually _real._ Peri opened a drawer, finding a rusty pair of shears and a large cloud of pollen. She waved it away and shut the drawer.

“I think we should go.” Peri said firmly.

“What?” he asked. “Why?”

“Doctor, I’m still not entirely sure that this plant isn’t why I started to hallucinate in the first place, should we be hanging around in a room full of it?”

“Well, I’m not entirely sure that it _is_.” he replied curtly.

“I’m just thinking of the kind of things people breed plants for…” Peri said, examining one of the trees, “And the fact I got a big faceful of that pollen before I started hallucinating.”

“Peri, are you suggesting that these plants are narcotic?”

“I’m suggesting whoever lived here was less of a professor and more of a drug dealer.” Peri responded flatly. “Are you saying you can’t see a drug lord living in this fancy place?”

“I didn’t think of this house as ‘fancy’ so much as luxurious, but I _do_ see your point.”

 

The young woman turned on her heel, trying to put her finger on what it was about the conservatory that was making her apprehensive. It wasn’t the fact it was abandoned, the entire house had been and it hadn’t given her this feeling. It was _just_ the conservatory had put her on edge, something about the way the light filtered through the leaves made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. That seemed a little strange to her, given that she had wanted to explore this planet for its plant life and the conservatory had a fascinating mixture of wild and cultivated plants. She should have been finally relaxing and enjoying their exploration, but all she wanted to do was to leave it. At least when they were out in the forest, she had felt safe.

Suddenly, Peri realised what it was about this room that had been putting her on edge.

“Doctor.” she said suddenly, “Wasn’t it just twilight?”

“Yes.” he replied, stiffening and looking around the conservatory. “I suppose the suns must have set while we were in the foyer. Or at least one of them, it was bright enough in the study. We watched the glowing insects out of the window for some time. It should be well dark by now.”

“Then why does it look like mid-afternoon?” she asked nervously. The Doctor inhaled sharply and looked up at the criss-crossing vines that covered the glass, but still let in the grey light of teatime.

“Yet another question, Peri. Perhaps one of the previous ones might answer it, for I have found no answers for them.” he answered softly. Peri stared at the ceiling with him, taking a step towards him and offering her hand, which he accepted gratefully.

 

They stared up at the ceiling and considered the situation. At length, out loud, to each other. It seemed a bit silly, given that they each knew just as much as the other, but they had formed a habit of it. Expediting was as familiar as arguing and there was something comforting about it. At least it was better than staring slack-jawed at the sunlight.

“Questions with no answers…” the Doctor murmured.

“Are we really worried about the questions?”

“Everything is a question.” said the Doctor. “Why you’re seeing what you are seeing is a question. Why the light changes in every room we cross is a question, and I don’t think either of use will be able to do anything about your hallucinations if we don’t answer them.” He quickly turned his face to her.

“Don’t think that I’m ignoring your distress in light of a mystery to solve, and do not think that I’m not frightened for your sake.”

“You could have fooled me.” Peri grumbled ironically.

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘Congratulations, Doctor, because that’s exactly what I thought was going on.’.” she spat, pulling her hand away.

“Peri!” he snapped.

“Sorry, I guess I wasn’t as calm about this whole hallucinating thing as I thought I was. she spat. “ And for all I know, you’re hallucinating too.”

“Well, I’m going to have to assume that I’m _not_ for now, because quite frankly, our chances for reaching the bottom of this time-differential problem when neither of us are aware of reality are much improved by working under that assumption.” the Doctor explained. “Conversely, if one of us, in this instance the one with a quite extensive background in temporal physics, retains his lucidity, then solving the matter will run immensely smoother; don’t you agree, Peri?”

“Time-differential problem?” Peri repeated.

“Each room in this house appears to be at least a few hours separated from another. It’s a simple thing, I’m quite surprised you didn’t understand me.”

“Oh, I _understood_ you, I just can’t believe you said it.” Peri retorted. “Yes, it’s the wrong time of day out there and it’s freaking me out too, but I don’t want to try and figure out why that’s happening when I keep seeing things that aren’t there. I’m not being unreasonable Doctor, I _do_ want to know what’s going on, but it’s not my top priority right now, and a minute ago, it didn’t sound like it was your, either.”

“You’re rambling, Peri, you _have_ noticed that, haven’t you?”

The Doctor walked along a flowerbed, examining the direction the plants were growing in and comparing it to the sky outside the glass. Peri ran along behind him, furious at the dismissal.

“Of _course_ I’m rambling!” she cried. “I’m scared and you’re stuck on investigating what caused it instead of getting to safety!”

“Come now, Peri, do you really expect me not to express the least bit of scientific curiosity?”

“It would have been nice!” Peri exclaimed. “It would have been nice, for once, if you took _some_ notice of my opinion before you led us off on a wild goose chase. Yes, it’s strange. So what? It’s not like this is weirdest thing we’ve ever gone up against, Doctor.”

“Well, _yes,_ but I had rather hoped that at least some of what we were dealing with appeared to be connected to each other. Surely, something must be, I’m simply not seeing it for some reason. It’s probably your fault.” he added, turning his face back to Peri.

“ _My_ fault?!” she demanded.

“Not the problem itself, Peri, just the fact that I’m not seeing it.” the Doctor replied, as calmly as he could manage. “While half my mind is better than all of nearly anyone else’s, I’d rather have all of my attention focused on finding the solution, instead of being split between it and being distressed by your well-being.” He turned his attention back to the sky. The position of the flowers suggested that they were heliotropic, but the stems looked immobile. He would have quite liked Peri’s opinion on them, but the Doctor rather doubted this was quite the time to ask for it.

“Oh, so you noticed after all.” she huffed, folding her arms over her chest. Peri sneered. “Careful, Doc, if you keep this up I might start thinking you care.” That was the last straw. The Doctor whirled on his heel and stormed towards her.

“Allow me to finish this conversation for you, Peri.” snarled the Doctor. “ ‘I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why it’s happening, and I’m not sure how I’m going to find out.’ _‘Stop swaggering about and listen to me, you meretricious bedlamite!’_ ‘I am listening to you, if _you_ were listening to _me_ , you’d know that!’ ” he adopted a higher tone for her half of the argument, which was far from accurate or flattering.

“I have never _called_ you that!” she gasped.  “I’m not even sure what that means!”

The Doctor inhaled sharply through his teeth, fuming on how impossible Peri was to deal with sometimes. However, one of them did have to bend at least a little if they had any hope of either escaping or solving the mystery. While she was a very affective assistant at times; a true compliment to his genius, they were perfectly useless at odds with one another.  It fell to him, as the older, more mature and wiser of the two, to end the argument. It was such a terrible burden being the reasonable one in their relationship, and perhaps one day when Peri was in better sorts he would mention it. But not today.

“Peri.” the Doctor said, as amelioratingly as he could manage. “Please don’t think I’m not frightened. Yes, you are probably more frightened than I am, but you have every right to be. I don’t know what images your mind is or is not subjecting you to, and as such I can’t begin to guess how you’re reacting to them. I can only assume you’re handling it as best as you can; though again, that’s much like assuming I am not hallucinating, because the alternative is—well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

The Doctor took Peri’s shoulders in his hands and met her gaze firmly.

“If we’re both rummaging uselessly through two separate worlds, neither of which exist it wouldn’t do us any good to be aware of that fact. But I’m sure it hasn’t come to that.  We’re both quite lucid, and it stands to reason that even if I start hallucinating as well—which I don’t believe I have, everything you’ve described sounds quite out of place and I’ve noticed nothing of the sort—anything observed by both of us must be real. Therefore it is imperative that we keep describing as much of what we observe to each other as we are able. So yes, Peri, I’m more than concerned, I’m quite frightened; I’m just not panicking—at the moment.”

Peri chewed her lips with the same worried expression she tended to wear when the Doctor had a point she didn’t want to admit. This familiar footing heartened the Doctor considerably.

“And, for what it’s worth,” he added with a weak smile, “A ‘meretricious bedlamite’ is a poorly-dressed madman.”

Peri shook her head.

“Well—I can’t really say you’re not, but I wouldn’t have called you it.” she frowned. “Even if I was angry.” She laid her hand over his fondly, and his smile grew a little.

“Well-” said the Doctor, patting her shoulders. “Either way, I don’t think there’s much to be gained by hanging out here.”

“I’ll give you that much.” Peri grumbled with resignation.

“However, before we leave the conservatory, I would like your opinion on this as a student of botany. The position of the flower suggests it’s heliotropic, but the stem appears far too stiff to manage turning every day.”

Peri’s expression softened and she turned to the bed he indicated.

“I’ll see what I can do, but most of these plants are alien, or spliced beyond recognition. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to tell you much about them.” she admitted. The two broke apart and moved to the flowerbed. Like all others in the conservatory, it was covered in cracked green tiles, long snaking vines holding it together more than grout and built at nearly waist height, which brought the plants to eye level. Peri stepped over an overturned stool rooted in place by a past year’s growth, and carefully examined the plants growing there. While Peri found nearly a dozen different species in the bed at even a cursory glance. There was no question which plant the Doctor was talking about, though. The overall shape reminded Peri of forsythia, but the flowers were clumped together more like lilac, pale blue in colour. The way it was growing make the whole thing look as the bush was frozen in time as it was caught in a windstorm.

“There’s a lot of flowering shrubs in this conservatory.” Peri began. “Whatever else we know about the people who lived here, I think that at least some of these were planted to be decorative.”

The Doctor nodded. Peri was uneasy about handling the plant at first, but, reassuring herself that all of the plants it resembled were perfectly safe, she touched the plant and tested the strength of the stem. It snapped off in her hands right away.

“There. Look at that.” Peri held out the flower to the Doctor. Though she was confidant that it wasn’t toxic, she avoided touching the sap. They’d gotten into this situation by being careless with the local flora.

“There’s no way I can see that this plant turned it’s flowers toward the sunlight this morning.” Peri said confidently. “Unless this is a kind of alien plant that acts differently from every other flowering bush I can think of, it’s been growing toward this light it’s entire life. And that light source hasn’t moved.”

“Which means the suns have always been in that position in regards to these plants.” the Doctor continued.

“Either that or all of these plants are some kind of genetic freaks. They’re all moving towards the suns. They wouldn’t be doing that if the suns moved through the sky like they normally do.”

“Rather, the way a planet’s rotation makes it appear that suns move.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s not the point.” Peri frowned. “The point is, whatever’s happening, it looks like it’s been happening for a while. Doctor, do you think—well, it’s late afternoon here and it’s twilight in the library, if it’s always late afternoon here, it would be like keeping sunlamps on the plants the entire time. Sometimes gardeners do that, to control which direction the plants are growing in. Some small trees can be made to grow in spirals like that.”

“I rather doubt the plants fancy that.”

“Well, personally I’ve never asked them.” Peri commented, rolling her eyes.

“Well, thank you for your second opinion, Peri. Still, that’s rather what I thought.” the Doctor frowned. “Come along. No sense staying her any longer.” He turned and started to leave. Peri rushed after him.

“Have you satisfied your curiosity, Doctor?”

“Not nearly!” he replied, striding out of the conservatory. Peri rushed after him.

“Peri, do keep up!” he called. “I don’t at all fancy becoming separated again if the house is caught in a variety of timezones.”

“Well…” Peri offered, rushing along beside him, “We were separated before we new there was any danger, early on when I was getting that cutting in the foyer. Remember? So it probably doesn’t hurt anything if we were separated.”

“All the same, I’d rather we not, even if there were no trouble with the timezones. This house is in terrible repair, there’s still a good possibility of one of us might fall through the floor at any moment. In fact, I’d rather we not go upstairs for the time being.”

“If you’re worried about the floor, then don’t go tramping off like that, ” Peri frowned. “And if you want me to keep up, you should slow down a little.”

They came through the darkened dining room lined with chairs. Now that they had found the source of the chiming noise, they were able to observe the room with in more detail.

 

In this room, the shredded wallpaper had started its life as a flocked burgundy, and judging by the colour shown in their footprints in the dust, the wooden floor was a handsome cherry finish before the lacquer peeled up and broke in sheets like strewn leaves. Fluted trim had fallen from the ceiling in several places and lay across the chairs like dropped sticks. A chandelier just slightly too large for the height of the ceiling still hung, somewhat precariously, by three of it’s four nails. Peri didn’t like the way it creaked when she passed under it, and she vaulted of one of the overturned chairs to remove herself from it’s likely path should it fall. This proved unnecessary, because while it turned slightly in place with her movement, it held fast to the ceiling and gave every impression it had for years and would continue to do so for long after she left. Empty sconces in a similar style lined the walls, many of them also missing parts of their crystal. This room would have probably been excellently lit, while the electricity was live. Which in itself was baffling, as Peri clearly remembered several other rooms lit only my oil lamps. Behind some of the chairs stacked more carefully, there was patch which stood out as perfect blackness in the dim. Perhaps it was a doorway.

 

“Doctor, do you have a flashlight?” asked Peri, picking her way over strewn chairs.

“There’s no way to tell what time it is in this room,” the Doctor mused, turning about. “If you stand just here, you would assume that it’s evening. However-” he spun about on the ball of his foot, sending his coat whirling, “-the light from the conservatory suggests afternoon.”  He paused and cocked his head.

“Doctor, did you notice this door before?” Peri asked. She glanced over her shoulder, squinting in the dim. “Come on, bring out your flashlight, I’m sure you’ve got one somewhere!”

“But as this room does not have its own window, there is no way to tell what time it is _here._ A timepiece would do no good, of course, as we would be bringing it in from another timezone and it would remain true to it’s point of origin, as we remain true to ours.” the Doctor continued. “I’m sure you’ve noticed, Peri, it’s the work of seconds to cross each boundary and we feel no loss of time upon changing rooms; as one would if asleep for some time.”

“Doctor, are you listening to me?”

“My word, Peri!” the Doctor exclaimed. “There’s a door just to your left! I believe was far too preoccupied with the chime to see it the first time we passed this way. Come, let’s see where it leads.” Peri winced visibly.

“In any case, you really shouldn’t be rummaging around in the dark, particularly given your hallucinations.” the Doctor frowned. “Do wait a moment while I find us a torch, I’m quite sure I’ve got one somewhere.” Peri sighed and rolled her eyes.

“I really look forward to our little talks, Doc.”

 

The Doctor located his torch and shone the beam on Peri. In the circle of white-gold light, the door now stood out clearly against the torn paper. The Doctor wove through the broken chairs with greater speed now that he could clearly see what he was doing.

“Is it locked?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.” said Peri, putting a hand on the knob. “I just didn’t want to open it until you were over here, because we decided we should stay together.”

“And it would be simply dandy if it turned out that it was a broom cupboard and we both have to make it through the chairs again for nothing.”

“Right, I forgot that our time is so precious in here.” said Peri, rolling her eyes. “We have _so_ much to do.” She started moving chairs away from the door, partially so it could open and partially to have something to do.

“Our time _is_ precious! It always is!” the Doctor exclaimed. “The fact that our time changes as we move through space doesn’t change that fact. If anything, is has become more precious because our very bodies put a limit on the effort we may put into finding our way out. Usually, a body is not tested by living the same few hours of the day over and over again. Think of the flowers in the conservatory, Peri. Always reaching for the same point, with no night or change of any sort? Their growth and life cycle has been completely disarranged by this temporal anomaly, think of what it may, in time, do to us. And we are far more complex creatures than a flowering bush.”

Peri grimaced.

“For what it’s worth, Doctor, I think before that happens we’ll starve to death. Or I’ll hallucinate myself into broken chair or something, this place isn’t exactly ideal living conditions for me in the best mental health.”

“Quite. I have a few biscuits in one pocket, but that will hardly sustain us if we are indeed trapped.” he agreed. “Of course, that’s not going to become an issue if you injure yourself, as you said.”

The Doctor caught up with Peri.

“Shall we?” he asked. Peri nodded, and opened the door.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally going to be twice this length, but in reviewing it I decided that was ridiculous. Gosh, what should I put here? Should I lampshade the imagery inspired by the lyrics of Plant Life?  
> When I was writing this, I read out the "spoons!" exchange to some friends who do not watch Classic Who, and they agreed that it encapsulated what they knew about that era of the show.


	4. I Won’t Feel Dead Anymore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peri's condition worsens, and the Doctor becomes distressed. No one answers their S.O.S.

            They entered an open, dusty room with several more pieces of furniture under white sheets clustering closely to the walls. The ceiling stretched vastly away from them, flying buttresses and a crystal chandelier fallen from it’s height to lay in cracked pieces on the rotting floorboards. Ivy climbed the fallen chandelier, and pollen dusted the leaves and covered the floor with pale, almost chalky powder. An impressive staircase swept out in front of the door, almost hiding it in the shadows.

            There was the slightest moment of disorientation, feeling that this was familiar but slightly wrong, before the Doctor realized that they had made a circuit of the east wing and returned to the foyer through a different door.

            “This is where we came in.” said Peri.

            “Quite right, Peri.” the Doctor agreed, taking her hand. The pair moved deeper into the room, cutting a fresh trail in the dust.

            “Look.” said the Doctor, leading Peri towards a patch of unusual flowers. Aside from the travellers themselves, everything else they had encountered in this house was muted in colour, soft and dream-like. Small, pale blue flowers ringed the tuffets he indicated, but the patch itself burned against the lavender-grey and sage-greens the house could have been painted in with bright tropical pinks and oranges.

            The Doctor and Peri cautiously approached the alien patch of foliage. She took the lead, furrowing her brows at the plants as if she was trying to be sure of something.

 

            “I took a cutting of a plant like that on Agoshotinai.” Peri said suddenly, pointing at the fuchsia bloom. “The stem, the stamen—Doctor, I think that’s the same species, if not the same plant. You said that we were in the thirty-somethingth century then, and now we’re in the twenty-five hundreds?”

            “And on the other end of the galaxy.” the Doctor frowned. “There’s only one way that this flower could have gotten here…” Peri crept up to the plant, trying to get a close look at the base without touching it. It wasn’t that she thought it might be poisonous; in fact she was positive it wasn’t. It wasn’t poisonous, it was the exact same plant she’d examined nearly a year ago.

            “I know these plants. I know all of these plants.”

            “Is that surprising for a student of botany?” the Doctor asked.

            “Yes, actually.” Peri replied. “I could make a guess at the genus of most of the plants we’ve seen on this planet, but I haven’t recognised a single one. That’s not surprising, I mean, I’ve never been on this planet before. But… I’ve seen each of these before. I’ve studied them… Doctor-” She moved aside a low leaf and looked at the base of the cluster.

            “Doctor—am I hallucinating again?” she gasped. “Are you seeing this‽”

            “Good Gallifrey…” the Doctor agreed, covering his mouth.

 

            Beneath the fresh leaves and blooms that had joined the climbing vines and pale flowers which thrived in the broken shade of the house, lay the binding and pages of a most foreign object. It seemed like a matter of hours to Peri since she had left this room, dropping her cutting book and the vines that were springing from it. But, judging from the vines that now rooted the cover firmly into the floorboards of the house, the book had been there for at least a week. Or these plants had been growing just as quickly was they had when Peri had fled the room. She wasn’t sure which one was more likely.

            “That’s my mounting book…” she murmured.

            “Congratulations, Perpugilliam Brown.” said the Doctor dryly. “You’ve committed an act of ecological terrorism.”

 

            Peri snapped her eyes back up to the Doctor and frowned.

            “Well, ecology attacked!” she retorted. “At least… I thought it did… but if I’m hallucinating-“

            “Peri, look at the book. This is not an hallucination, not at all.” The Doctor offered Peri his hand and helped her to her feet. “If anything, this confirms that you didn’t start hallucinating until we entered the study.”

            His voice rose with excitement and he gestured with his free hand. Peri narrowly avoided being hit in the face.

            “Proving that the hallucinations were indeed caused by the pollen which you inhaled! Now that we are certain when we started hallucinating, we know what caused it, and we can focus on other questions. Such as-” the Doctor spread his hands imploringly.

            “Why am _I_ not hallucinating?” he asked socratically. “I’ll tell you. The very physicialnomical differences which have caused so much distress in our domestic life! Things you think are perfectly edible which would surely kill me.”

            “Doctor, this is no time to tease me about my cooking!”

            “I was talking about aspirin, Peri, but there _is_ a reason why I burn water and still do the cooking on the ship.” And here came the nose-tap. Peri scowled.

            “For whatever reason, what’s affecting you doesn’t have the same affect on Timelords.”

            “I’m still not sure we should be working with the assumption that you’re not being affected by this.” Peri pointed out.

            “I feel unchanged, Peri.”

            “So?” Peri asked. “I’m still feel fine, I’m clear-headed and if weren’t for the fact that what I’m seeing isn’t possible, I wouldn’t know when I was hallucinating.”

            “My dear girl, if I’m not in control of my faculties, how am I to save you‽” he demanded. Peri fell silent and stared at him.

            “Is this what this is about?” she asked. “You playing the hero again?”

            “This is about making quite sure that you’re safe, and if a hero is required for that, then I shall be it.” the Doctor said quietly. Peri shook her head. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to punch him or hold him more. She could do both; she supposed, one swiftly after the other, but neither would help much in the long run. She sighed heavily and brushed some hair away from her face.

            “Well, it looks like I’m going to need a new mounting book, aren’t I?” she commented, trying to smile. It was the sort of joke she liked to release her tension, in most circumstances, but it wasn’t doing the trick this time. She wasn’t sure if it was the hallucinations, something else that changed in her brain that made her easier to scare when whatever was making her hallucinate, or just walking through such a quiet, dark abandoned house. She felt silly for getting worked up like this, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.

            The Doctor looked at her and sighed at how weak the joke was. What little smile she had faded. He immediately regretted that; the last thing he wanted was to increase her unease, but there was little that could be done for her mood now.

            “Let’s just go.” Peri frowned.

            “You would be perfectly happy with that, wouldn’t you?” asked the Doctor, cocking his head. She snapped her gaze back to his face.

            “I’d be _ecstatic._ ” she replied witheringly. The Doctor grimaced sheepishly and awkwardly toyed with a curl behind his ear.

            “Perhaps… a compromise can be reached. We are in agreement that your hallucinations are our foremost concern, yes?”

            “You say that, but I’ve got a feeling you’re about to try and talk me into staying.”

            “Heavens no, my dear!” the Doctor exclaimed, cradling her face in his hands. “I agree, we must leave and sort you out immediately. I won’t even ask you to return if you do not wish to.

But perhaps, when we’ve done so, you would not object to me returning to investigate what caused these unusual hallucinations in you.”

            “Forget it!” Peri retorted, knocking one of his hands away. “I’m not letting you stumble around by yourself, you’d probably step on a weak place on the floor and break your neck. And then where would we be?”

            “Well, very shortly after breaking my neck, I imagine I’d be provided with a new one.” The Doctor smiled darkly.

            “Stop it.” she scolded. “I can’t stand the thought of you going through that again, even if you weren’t alone. If you’re trying to convince me to follow you around and make sure you don’t hurt yourself, it’s working.” Peri frowned. He smiled, giving her hair a final stroke before releasing his hold on her.

            “If we are to recollect ourselves, then I suppose we ought to ‘get on with it’, as you might say.” He began to cross the floor in long strides, leaving a fine wake of the powdery dust and pollen mixture flying from his jacket and Peri standing in the centre of it. She sputtered and dashed after him, more confident in the stability of the floor now that they had crossed it once already. Their footsteps rung and echoed in the empty house, cutting fresh tracks in the dust. Peri watched this closely, following him and adding her own footprints to where the Doctor’s long strides had been marked out in the dust.

 

            “This is the first room we entered.” The Doctor said softly. “Look, our footprints are still fresh in the dust.”

            “Pollen.” Peri corrected, grabbing his arm. “And unless this is me hallucinating, they’re not as fresh as all that. Look at the ones we’ve just made, Doctor.”             She took hold of his shoulder and gently directed his gaze.

            “There’s a fresh coat over our footsteps.” she pointed out. “That usually takes a couple of hours. Either these plants shed it much faster than any on Earth, or we took longer exploring the house than we thought.”

            “Neither possibility is particularly comforting.” he frowned. “I’m worried that perhaps there’s more to this house than it seems. That it’s guiding us along a particular path, showing us particular rooms…”

            “Or we got lost.” Peri suggested.

            “Lost? _Lost?_ With my impeccable sense of direction?” The Doctor asked, affronted.

            “It’s been known to happen.” replied Peri with a saccharine smile.

            “I hardly think this is the situation for that sort of humour, Peri.” the Doctor frowned, taking her arm in his. “As I was saying, before your observation about the dust settling, this trouble we’re having with the time changing might well have been the instability mentioned in Dr. Reimer’s ledger. Look at the sunlight, Peri.”

            He gestured up at the thing shafts of light breaking through the parts of the ceiling which had rotted away entirely.

            “It’s definitely the same angle it was when we first came into the house.” Peri agreed. “It’s hitting the same patch of flowers it was before, I made a note of it in my cutting book…” She half grimaced, half smiled.

            “And then it seems your cutting book made a couple of notes of its own.” the Doctor finished.

            She cast her eyes to the ceiling again. Yes, the flowers were in exactly the same amount of shade she’d seen when she first written about the plant’s growing conditions. Peri wasn’t sure if felt gratified that their observation about the time of day changing from room to room had been confirmed, or if she had wanted to be mistaken.

 

            “Let’s just get out of here.” she said firmly. The Doctor sighed, still disappointed at her lack of curiosity, even if he could understand it in this instance. Slowly, he began to nod.

            “Yes. Well. Let’s.” he said slowly, gesturing towards the door. Peri started up again, leaving the Doctor behind. He watched her trot forward for a minute, considering her springy movements as she crossed the floor and wondering how it was with a gait like that she neither kept up with him nor fell over more often than she did. There was, of course, and aesthetic aspect to it, but that hardly seemed relevant to the matter of the abandoned house or her hallucinations, so the Doctor promptly disregarded it.

 

            His coat flared behind him briefly as he rushed to meet his companion at the door. Peri, having more interest in leaving the house, had reached the door before him and was attempting to open it.

            “Doctor—“ she grunted, heaving with both hands. “Doctor, I think the door’s stuck!”

            “Oh, let me, you silly girl!” he tutted, shooing her aside. “You have to be careful with these antiques.”

            “I’m never careful with you…” Peri muttered under her breath. The Doctor ignored this comment, turned the door handle, and gave it a firm but delicate tug. Nothing happened. He wrenched at the door with a similar effect.

            “You’re right! It _is_ stuck, it won’t budge!”

            “Why do you sound surprised?” Peri asked.

            “Surprised or not, Peri, I highly doubt either of us is going to get this door open by conventional means.”

            “Well, then we’ll force it open!” snapped Peri. She kicked at the door with her heel, which had no result other than backing her stumble backwards mumbling in pain. The Doctor put his shoulder into it, with back the same effect. He glowered at the door as if it personally offended him and rubbed his shoulder.

 

            Peri considered the door for moment, then looked around the room.

            “Well…” she guessed, biting her lip. “These plants aren’t growing the way normal plants do, it’s _way_ faster than almost anything I’ve seen. Maybe some more vines grew up over the door and that’s why it won’t open? If there’s a tree or something holding it closed, it wouldn’t matter how hard we pushed on it.”

            “I don’t know, Peri, were that the case I imagine we would have been able to budge the door at least a crack…” the Doctor frowned. “No matter what we do to the door, it doesn’t seem affected by our efforts at all.”

            “Oh, it’s affected.” Peri rolled her eyes and pointed to the dent the Doctor’s shoulder had made. Splaying his fingers across the door, he felt the dent with a pensive expression. The Doctor pulled a device out from inside his jacket and pointed it at the door. It looked vaguely related to his sonic lance, but with a larger digital readout Peri thought looked like a state-of-the-art graphing calculator. She was aware that many of the things the Doctor owned that looked state-of-the-art to her were probably antiquated to him, but she appreciated the idea that she had some idea of what his instruments actually did, even if her ideas were wrong.

            The Doctor read the readout with a furrowed brow, and then the colour drained from his face. Peri touched the crock of his elbow nervously.

            “What is it, Doctor?”

            “An instrument malfunction, I very much hope.” he answered, turning the device towards the centre of the room. Whatever the device was doing, it didn’t seem to be pleasing the Doctor very much. He pointed the device at Peri, pressed a few buttons, and waited. The device responded with a digital chirrup that sounded almost cheerful, but seemed to distress the Doctor.

            “Is something wrong with me, Doctor?” she asked, “Besides the hallucinations?”

            “That’s what’s worrying me, Peri…” said the Doctor, keying in an apparently complex command. “According to this, there’s nothing wrong with you at all…”

            “…well, then we know whatever that thing is is malfunctioning!” Peri mewled.

            “Which would explain why it seems to think there is nothing beyond this door.” said the Doctor, returning the device to his pocket. “These doors do not lead back to the Tardis, Peri. These doors don’t lead anywhere at all.”

            “Nothing behind the door?” Peri asked, confused. “Do you mean, there’s nothing blocking the way out?”

            “No, Peri, I rather wish I did.” said the Doctor flatly. “What I mean is, so far as I can check, this door will not open because there is nothing for it to open into. There is no space to accept its swing, or us for that matter. There is no time which we could enter into and act in. What I mean to say, Peri, is precisely what I have said. There is nothing, _nothing_ , beyond that door.” Peri stared blankly at him, not so much because she didn’t understand what he was saying as she rather wished she hadn’t.

            “…how?” she said at length. “How the heck did that happen?”

            “I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea, Peri.” the Doctor frowned, casting a furtive glance at the door. Part of him wanted to have another go at the door, but the part of him that was still rather sore from ramming the door with his shoulder thought better of it.

            “Doctor, let’s think about this sensibly. We already know that I _am_ hallucinating, or at least that I was. Maybe I stopped, but there’s no other way to explain what I’ve been seeing.”

            “There’s always another way to explain things, Peri.” said the Doctor, shaking his head. “Would you care for me to list off some of the other reasons you might be experiencing these things?”

            “I’d actually much prefer if you didn’t…” answered Peri, but the Doctor had already started.

            “It’s always possible that you’re simply losing your mind, which isn’t precisely the same thing as hallucinating, but I wouldn’t worry about that as it’s rather unlikely because the scan should have shown some sign of mental deterioration. Then of course there is the possibility of psychic projections, hypnosis, even a lifeform that cannot be perceived by me for some reason. There is very little that would surprise me at this point.”

            “Doctor-“ she pleaded, sounding exhausted.

            “Don’t interrupt, Peri.” the Doctor scolded. “The problem is not that you’re seeing things that aren’t there, Peri. It’s that you’re seeing things that I am not. This does not necessarily mean that they aren’t real.”

            “If you’re trying to be comforting, it really isn’t working.” Peri frowned.

            “I’m not trying to be anything of the sort.” replied the Doctor. “In fact, I would have been rather worried if you were anything short of distressed by that.”

 

            The pair turned their attentions back to the door, the Doctor touching his lips thoughtfully and Peri folding her arms over her chest.

            “There’s no sense fixating on this door, I suppose.” said the Doctor with a sigh. “It’s clearly not the way out.”

            “But Doctor, didn’t you say that the only way out that we can be sure of the Tardis being there when we leave is if we leave the same way we came?”

            “I did at that, but given there is nothing outside of this door, _including the Tardis,_ apparently I was wrong.” The Doctor shook his head. “Not even _I_ am infallible, Peri.”

            “ _Really_ ⸮ I’ll have to remember that.” she replied dryly.

            “Oh, do be serious! The wood we left is not beyond this door. Nothing is!” the Doctor cried. “That means that as far as we are concerned, I have no idea where the Tardis is or how we are going to get to it!”

            Peri bit her lip.

            “I kinda want to ask if you might be hallucinating too, but then we’d be able to get the door open.” she grumbled nervously. “It would just make me feel better, I guess.”

            “I’m almost certain I’m not Peri, as I’ve told you before. Whatever is happening to you, either it happened when you were alone or it doesn’t affect timelords.” the Doctor answered. “And _do_ rest assured that as soon as I can think of something of comfort to you I will share it with you immediately.”

            He wrapped his arm around Peri’s shoulders, for all the good that would do.

            “But if there’s, well, nothingness behind the door, how did it get there?” Peri asked. The Doctor stared into the middle distance as she spoke, his eyes glazing over.

            “ ‘ _The instability grows, the grand chamber has been cut off, forced to move to the second-best chamber._ ’ ” recited the Doctor.

            “Dr. Reimer’s ledger?” asked Peri. “Do you think that’s connected?”

            “Rooms are being cut off. It is not natural, and it’s certainly not normal.” said the Doctor. He released her shoulders and regarded her thoughtfully.

 

            “Suppose there’s no way out?” he asked softly.

            “Oh, don’t say that…”

            “But suppose there isn’t?” he repeated, more intensely. “Suppose that we wander through this house for days, months—however long we can sustain our weak forms on plants we dare eat and crumbs of sodabread from my pockets?” He stared soulfully into her eyes. Peri narrowed them; she was not in a mood to have her eyes soulfully stared into.

            “All too soon, my dear, you shall die. That is unavoidable.” The Doctor expelled a syllable of humourless laughter and cupped one hand around her face. Peri briefly considered knocking it aside but decided to let him wear himself out on this tangent rather than argue with him.

            “Yes, even if we were to escape, _that_ is unavoidable. Perhaps in here, we might be able to stretch out your frail mortality for… days? Weeks? Who’s to say when there is nothing to mark the time and only the other’s voice to keep each of us from going mad? Mad‽” He sighed and drew his hands away.

            “Each of us is halfway gone as it is, you with the condition you’ve developed here, and I with what I came with. But no, even if we kept our minds, you will surely wither and die at my side. And what shall become of me after that?”

            “Are you going to be done any time soon?” Peri asked irritably. The Doctor continued as if he hadn’t heard her.

            “You shall leave me, Perpugilliam, to lay your bones in some dusty corner of this cavernous tomb and watch as the vegetation you so adored in life claims the bones of my only beloved. You will abandon me to wander these lonely halls without even your voice too keep me from going mad.”

            “Oh, don’t play the gothic hero, not now…” Peri moaned.

            “Why ever not?” he asked sharply. “In this regeneration, your choices appear to be the gothic hero or the fool, and I doubt the latter will do you any good in this situation. Not that the former is a _great_ benefit, but at very least it suits the severity of our circumstances.” The thought seemed to depress him greatly. The Doctor turned away and strode back into the centre of the room.

 

            Peri watched him walk away, involuntarily comparing the Doctor’s brilliantly coloured coat to the flowers that had burst to life from her cutting book. Besides those two patches of colour—and her own yellow leotard, she supposed—there were no other bright colours in the entire house. Possibly none on the entire planet. It was so hard to tell when they landed in one place and then only moved over the space of a town at most. And even though this house was awfully large for a house, it was nothing like as large as a town. Peri smiled bitterly to herself. They could be a few short miles from a white sand beach with a cool ocean sparkling under the suns, and they would never find out about it. Partially because if they ever got out of this house Peri would drag them straight back to the Tardis and the Doctor could just deal with it if he didn’t like it, but still.

 

            The forlorn majesty of the foyer, with the vines crawling up to the high domed ceiling and the clusters of furniture covered by dusty white sheets, had lost very little of its beauty or mystery since she had seen it last. Now that she wasn’t as fixated on the flowers at its base, she could really appreciate how impressive the staircase was. Two wide series of steps curved down to a central landing, the landing itself about as large as her dorm at the college was. It wasn’t a very impressive size for a dorm room, but for the middle of a staircase it was astounding. A seven-foot rose window filled the wall behind the landing, it’s panels broken and that climbing plant that wasn’t quite ivy climbing in and out of the framework. From the central landing, the steps curved down the final story into the foyer. Peri half-expected Scarlett O’Hara to start flouncing down in a curtain any moment now.

            In fact, something about Peri’s unease turning to a sort of muted terror made the whole scene more hauntingly beautiful. The double set of tracks cutting through the pollen, the dust caught in the folds of the fabric that draped the furniture built up and left the sheets heavy and dense it all stood before her like a tableau. Part of her wanted to start talking, rambling, something to fill the silence in this house; but it unnerved her in such a way that she couldn’t bring herself to say anything at all.

            She wasn’t used to silence, between her and the Doctor there was always something to be talking about, arguing, screaming. Even when they didn’t want to talk, one of them would be playing music, singing along, and the other would be critiquing the music and explaining very loudly why they didn’t want to talk.

            Instead Peri contemplated the silence and the shadows in the dim, broken room. The vines and the flowers flourished, even the Doctor was quiet as he inspected the patch of flowers that had sprung from her mounting book. Everything seemed so still that she was almost afraid to move.

            She didn’t know why, but her mind kept going to haunted houses. Not the carnival rides she liked when she was younger, but the nasty old places too full of death and anger to feel right ever again. The kind she was sure didn’t actually exist. Peri didn’t think she’d ever find a thrill in having a rubber mask on a stick waved her face again; not after how she’d lived her last year.

 

            It was stupid, now that she thought about it, because not only did Peri not believe in ghosts; she felt stupid for getting scared about being trapped in an abandoned house that was falling apart while she hallucinated. Okay, not that stupid, now that she thought about it. And, if she thought about it, she didn’t believe in things in sheets rattling chains around because they were so angry about being dead but that didn’t mean hauntings didn’t necessarily exist. With everything else that she thought was impossible but had seen happen since she started travelling with the Doctor, part of her wouldn’t be that surprised if one day they found out that there actually _was_ a life after death. If you were around just the right aliens with robots that shoot chemicals into your eyes. Peri shook her head, she had enough problems right now without thinking about ghosts. The Doctor would probably laugh at her if he knew what she was thinking about.

 

            Although, now that she had thought of it, she could see why her mind went that way. It wasn’t a far step from a horror movie, a big empty house falling to pieces in front of her. Especially with the sheets on the chairs, clustering at the corners of the room like watching animals. They did look a little bit like ghosts. It was funny, there was nothing at all scary about someone throwing a white shroud over something, but the idea that she might be able to pull a dusty, water stained sheet off and find there was nothing there at all… why was she letting her mind fill with thoughts like this? The situation was bad enough as it was.

 

            A distressingly calm, smooth voice filled the room. Peri’s head jerked up, startled by the noise. As soon as she had, she scolded herself internally; she should have been more confused by the fact the Doctor had stayed quiet this long. He was standing in the centre of the room, staring up at the hole where the chandelier had ripped part of the ceiling out on the way down. His arms spread and he turned in place, marvelling at the beauty of the ruin. He didn’t see a reason not to, he clearly had all the time in the world to admire it.

“ _The rosemary nods upon the grave; The lily lolls upon the wave; Wrapping the fog about its breast, The ruin moulders into rest…”_ he murmured, crossing the floor.

            “Stop that.” said Peri. “It’s morbid.”

            “Come now, Peri.” the Doctor smiled. “Poe’s one of yours.”

            “I do not take personal responsibility for every American poet, thank you.” she answered irritably. “It’s bad enough being trapped here, and hallucinating, and having whatever is happening with the time not working right without you talking about death and ghosts.”

            “Ghosts?” said the Doctor. “Who’s talking about ghosts?” He cocked his head and regarded his companion curiously.

            “Peri, are you quite all right?” the Doctor asked sharply. “You haven’t started hallucinating again, have you?”

            “No!” she answered. “I mean—I don’t think so…” Peri shook her head. She bit her lip and moved away from the door.

 

            The Doctor strode forward, arms spread, leading with his pelvis and wearing a smile that said, "presenting myself for your love and adoration". Well, at least _that_ was normal.

            “I’ve had a thought, Peri.” he smiled. “It may be of some comfort to you.”

            “Oh?” she asked dryly. “Do tell.”

            “The intention of the experiments seem to be related to time travel, such as I am capable of in my Tardis, but it is clear that the experiments never made it half so far as my own people’s. These experiments have resulted in several phenomena; which may or may not be limited to or even include the time differential from room to room, the ‘cutting off’ of rooms described by Dr. Reimer and now proven by the loss of the front door, the plants which overcame your cutting book.” the Doctor soliloquized, more in his own element now that everyone was endangered and he was being allowed to talk to his hearts’ content, “And, chief among causes of your personal distress; the changes in your perception—very well, _hallucinations._ These are, in some way, connected. But how so, and how deeply, hm? Yes, that is our question, Peri!”

            “You’ve perked up.”

            “A sense of purpose does that to a person, Peri.” the Doctor said brightly, taking one of her hands in his. He then started back towards the centre of the foyer, dragging Peri after him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, she was glad that she didn’t have to distract him from his temper anymore. But having him on normal footing did allow her to focus on the fact that she was hallucinating, terrified by what she was seeing, and he was being a bigger drama queen about it than she was.

            “Where are we going _now_?”

            “To the beginning, or as near as we can get! We’re going to retrace our steps. I’m certain that once one conundrum is cleared away it will lead to the next answer, and eventually _one_ of these dilemmas will be your state of mind. Well, I’m certain that whatever it is that’s happening to you is connected to at least _one_ of these things.” continued the Doctor. “And then, we shall have gained insight into your state of mind. Which ought to be quite the treat for me, as your state of mind has eluded me as long as I’ve known you, my dear.”

            “Then let me shed a little light on my state of mind. I just want to get out of here, Doctor.” Peri shivered. “This place is like a nightmare.”

            “Would that it were, Peri.” frowned the Doctor. “I have rather more experience with nightmares than this.” He stopped moving to round on her, sending his coat flying around him. Peri had long since suspected he did that intentionally to draw as much attention to himself as possible. The Doctor cleared his throat and continued speaking. He seemed to want to make up for his relative quiet in the dining room.

 

            “I can understand why it is you want to leave, and in this case I made every attempt to free us. I still am trying, but failing the most direct route, we must pursue other avenues. Even you cannot deny that, can you?”

            “Yeah, _‘in this case’_ …” Peri muttered darkly.

            “I’ll attribute _that_ particular comment to your current fugue.” the Doctor retorted. “I’m getting rather tired of letting these little comments slide out of chivalry and affection. I understand you are under considerable strain, Peri, but _do_ try to buck up.”

            “I’ll buck you up.” Peri muttered darkly.

            “Ah, that’s more my Peri.” the Doctor said warmly. “Crass, even indelicate, but utterly forthright.” He patted her shoulders fondly and continued towards the back of the room.

            “Let us start from the beginning and examine what is left of your cutting book. We must determine at what point which phenomena started and which parts of it may be connected.

            “What do you mean, which phenomena?” Peri asked, following after.

            “Quite simply, did you actually see the plants overtake it? Clearly it happened, but did you actually witness it?”

            “What’s the difference?” Peri asked. “Are you saying you’ve got an idea about what’s going on now that you’re actually paying attention to it?” The Doctor waved away her concerns dismissively. Peri set her fists on her hips in indignation.

            “Doctor, if you know something about what’s happening to me—hell, about _anything_ that’d happening, I’d really like to hear about it!”

            “I don’t know anything, yet, and you’ve already proven that my theories will only distress you.” he replied, lifting a sprout to the dim, slanting light to examine it. Peri let out a sigh of disgust and stormed away from the Doctor before she started yelling at him again out of habit. The Doctor looked up at her as she moved away, and he was forced to smile. He would have to remember that trick: raising her ire could easily redirect her distress. The Doctor much preferred that Peri be angry with him than frightened for her safety. That was, perhaps, giving him too much credit in this case, but he had every intention of milking it for all it was worth.

 

            Peri for her part, fumed quietly as she sulked across the foyer. This wasn’t right. She really ought to turn on her heel and give the Doctor an earful; but at the same time she really didn’t want to deal with him right now. How was it she could get whiplash just trying to keep up with a single conversation?

 

            She glared at one of the walls at random, focusing all of her frustration at the Doctor and the whole situation at the cracked paint and peeling paper. _Damn you, cluster of furniture. Damn you, white sheet coated with pollen. Damn you, rather interesting climbing vine attaching yourself to the upper moulding. It looks like you have a particular clockwise spiral that you tend to grow in, is that because of the angle of light you’re getting through the window? No, it’s probably just the genetic style of that plant. I wish I could see an example of it that wasn’t caught in a time loop. Mostly because that means I wouldn’t be caught in a time loop, either._ She rolled her eyes.

_Peri, you’re getting distracted._ she chided herself. _You’ll be bad as the Doctor one of these days, and then where will you be? Where will_ he _be, with no one to talk him out dangerous investigations? You’ll both see something interesting and then wander off and die._

            Then, slowly, so slowly she couldn’t even work up a proper scream of shock, only gasp and stumble back a few steps, one of the sheets thrown over the furniture began to ruffle as if it were in a wind. Peri’s lips parted in surprise.

            “Doctor-” she said quietly.

            The ruffling passed from sheet to sheet, then one of them billowed up to the height of a man and moved away from the wall. The Doctor did not seem to notice that this was happening, or that Peri had said anything.

            _“Doctor_.” Peri repeated, more intensely.

            Other pieces of furniture followed suit, growing in height like seated people drawing to their feet and moving out into the centre of the floor. More than anything, they looked like, well, ghosts. Not the ghosts out of the horror films she’d watched in high school, but the white-sheet ghosts of Halloween decorations. The type that never really scared anyone. Unless, of course, several dozen of them were swirling across the foyer like dancers, almost but not quite bumping into each other. Not that there was anything to bump into, Peri could clearly see that there was nothing under the sheets, as while a few trailed the ground most of them hovered inches above the floor’s surface.

 

            Then, slowly, a sound joined them, a low, scraping noise. It was quiet at first, but it grew louder as it continued. With all of the sheets fluttering, it was difficult to place which one was making the noise, but after a moment Peri saw it.

            There was a large bureau or a wardrobe, it was hard to tell which with the sheet flung over it. Dust fluttered off of it in clouds as it advanced, sliding across the floor like there was someone pushing it from behind. Clearly there wasn’t, of course, the sheet flared behind it where hands would hold it down if it were being pushed. The bureau slid over the floor, gaining momentum and making the scraping of its feet grow in volume and pitch. Peri’s eyes shifted to its feet, and noticed with horror that the bureau was quite content to slide over patches of floor where there were no boards at all, and the scraping noise would not let up for a moment. Then, quite suddenly, it changed direction with a sudden jerk and barrelled directly towards where Peri was standing. The doors on the front sprang open, misshaping the sheet which covered them until it looked like it had spread its arms to embrace her. Peri cried out in fear and threw herself out of the way.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem which the Doctor recites is "The Sleeper" by Edgar Allen Poe, and can be read in its entirety here: webterrace.com/poe/The%20Sleeper.htm


	5. A Ghost on the Stairs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Peri travel deeper into the house, discovering yet more phenomena that makes Peri think of haunted houses.

            She hit the ground with a painful thud, not quite before the Doctor had spun to his feet and called out to her.

            “ _Peri_ ** _‽_** _”_ He bounded across the floor and knelt beside her. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” The Doctor offered Peri an arm but did not drag her to her feet just yet. She rubbed her shoulder gently, unsure of how hard she’s hit it when she fell. Of course, now that there wasn’t something barrelling towards her, Peri realised the whole thing was probably in her head. She looked up and checked the furniture. It was still, stacked against the walls of the foyer. Thick sheets of dust and ropes of vine kept the covered chairs in place. Clearly they hadn’t been moving. She couldn’t even make out which bureau she thought had been advancing on her. Peri moaned in frustration and leaned her head against the Doctor’s shoulder.

            “What happened?”

            "Doctor I- no. It was nothing."

            "What was?" he asked. "Peri, what you see?"

            Peri squeezed her eyes shut and covered her face with both hands. She didn’t want these things to start up again. They never seemed any less real than everything else she was seeing. And really, when she got down to it, none of them were any stranger than things she’d seen in her travels with the Doctor. The Doctor moved his arm around her properly, adjusting his position so he could kneel more comfortably by her side.

 

            “This won’t do at all.” he frowned. He shook his head, rubbing Peri’s arm as comfortingly as he could manage given he had no idea what was troubling her. “Oh, this will never do! How am I to help you with the physical dilemma of being trapped in this house and the troubling hallucinations at the same time? I don’t care for this, not at all. I’m.., I’m simply not used to it!”

            He frowned, and Peri slid her face out of her hands. If she intended to say something, she didn’t get a chance before he continued. He moved the hand which wasn’t stroking her arm to mirror the action on her hair.

            “...it’s all terribly backwards.” he said weakly. “You’re supposed to be convincing me I’m not losing my mind, not the other way round. Oh, how can you handle this situation so readily? You’ve always put me right in the past, and now that it is my turn to reciprocate… I simply have no idea where to begin. I know saying all of this is no good, for one. I’m sure you aren’t terribly interested in how I’m distressed that you’re distressed. It does rather sound like I’m pulling the focus all back to me I am. Perhaps I am.”

            Peri sniffed, not sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

            “You’ve always been a bit of a drama queen.”

            “ A ‘drama queen’, Peri? A drama queen‽” the Doctor demanded. He straightened in place and stopped the soothing motions. “A man of passion, surely, my dear. Perhaps even perfervid at times. In this case, I hardly think it’s surprising my ire was raised by the endangerment of the one dearest to me.”

            He drew back with a sigh. The “dear one” in question smoothed her clothes awkwardly and got her feet beneath her. The Doctor rose, offering Peri a hand up after him. She accepted, pushing a final lock of hair behind her ear once she was on her feet.

 

            “This is precisely what I meant, me carrying on because you’re distressed. It’s all terribly backwards. I simply have no idea how you manage.” the Doctor sighed, shaking his head.

            “You said that.” Peri replied.

            “It bears repeating.” the Doctor frowned. “Now-” He rounded on her in a flurry of colour.

            “Tell me what it is you saw.”

            “It’s gone now, Doctor, I don’t think I need you to confirm it wasn’t real.”

            “That as may be, Peri, but don’t discount the possibility that I might be of aid regardless. Two minds are more likely to see a pattern where one cannot, particularly when one of those minds is one such as mine. Do tell me what you’re seeing, and perhaps between us we can make sense of it.”

            “Does it really matter?”

            “Matter? Of course it matters, dear girl!” The Doctor took her shoulders in his hands. “There is clearly some pattern in the phenomena we’ve been witnessing, and I suspect that part of the reason that we haven’t discovered it yet is that neither of us is witnessing the entirety of the phenomena.”

            “Because I keep seeing things that aren’t there,” Peri asked uncertainly, cocking an eyebrow, “I’m not seeing everything that _is_ happening?”

            “More than that, Peri. I cannot see what it is you’re seeing. ‘ _Though this be madness, there is a method to it!’_ ” He tapped Peri on the nose. “Everything you’ve described thus far seems to be interacting with the environment in some way.” Peri frowned and pushed his hand away.

            “Well, I guess so, but it’s more like things are taking the place of other things.” she replied thoughtfully. “First there was… well, I don’t know if the flower in my book was a hallucination or not—”

            “Let us not call it an hallucination for the nonce.” the Doctor interrupted. “The first thing you saw was a plant growing at fantastic speed, and when you returned it had covered the book. Whether or not you witnessed it, it did in fact happen.”

            “Okay, then I saw the yellow bear-thing, but it turned out to be you. Then we went to see if the noise was in my head, and it turned out to be that wind chime. But then the wind chime turned into sharks.”

            “That’s also when we realised that time was not behaving normally.”

            “And then, just now…” Peri began. The Doctor shifted his gaze to her more intently. This was the part he hadn’t yet heard.

            “I… well, I’d gotten annoyed with you so I took a step back to calm down a little bit. I was looking at that vine there when I thought I saw a movement under one of the sheets. I called for you but…” she narrowed her eyes at the Doctor significantly.

            “ _You didn’t hear me.”_ she said icily.

            “Ah. Yes.” He was acutely aware of the fact that not only was he consciously ignoring Peri, but that she knew it as well. The Doctor began to worry if he would pull the curl behind his ear out completely if he kept tugging on it every time the conversation took an awkward turn.

            “Anyway,” Peri continued, “The sheets ruffled, like someone had opened up a door somewhere and there was a breeze…”

            “Which clearly there hasn’t been in some time.” the Doctor interrupted. “The dust lies in an even layer on the ground.”

            “Right. But then the furniture... stood up. Like—well, like ghosts. Ghosts in sheets walking all over the floor, but nothing was touching the floor. Just sheets floating around. I called to you again, you didn’t answer, then there was this scraping noise and a chest of drawers shot out at me. Well, not a chest of drawers, it had doors on it but you know what I mean. Then I screamed and jumped out of the way.”

            “Do not spare me detail, Peri. Any little thing might be significant.”

            “I’m not!” she protested. “That’s all that happened, it was all over pretty quickly.”

            “Hm, that’s an interesting point to make note of.” the Doctor commented. “The first hallucination lasted but a few seconds. By the time you reacted to it, it was over. Then it was some time until we made it into the conservatory, though the return to the foyer was somewhat quicker. You only saw the… spoon-fish for a few moments, then the chime returned to normal. And just now, the vision came sooner and lasted just a bit longer.”

            “It was much longer.” Peri disagreed. “I called for you a couple of times.”

            “It must have just seemed that way; I came to your aid as soon as I heard you.” the Doctor scoffed, shaking his head. The young woman narrowed her eyes at him.

            “I’m sure you did.” she muttered.

 

            The Doctor huffed impatiently and straightened his coat.

            “I think…” Peri began unsurely, “I think what I’m thinking about _might_ have an effect on what I’m seeing. But I’m not really sure.” Peri shook her head.

            “That does fit rather nicely into the ‘hallucinating’ theory, I will admit. If you were thinking of things and then saw them quite suddenly, it would suggest that the images are originating in your head.”

            “That was true with how the furniture turns into ghosts, but it doesn’t really fit with other things.”

            “Perhaps your condition is advancing?”

            “But I would have thought that I’d only see things that I recognised.” said Peri, shaking her head. “I know I’ve never seen anything like that bear before. Or the sharks.”

            “I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, Peri.” the Doctor replied. “It’s quite possible for a mind to generate images it hasn’t yet seen. If that were not true, why, the creative process wouldn’t exist at all! The sentient mind is a remarkable thing, Peri, capable of the most varied invention and variety. I will grant there is a certain aspect of rearranging elements that one is familiar with into unfamiliar situations that is often used by artists, particularly the surrealists. Ah, Salvador was an unusual man… always fiddling with those naff whiskers of his… he always did use _far_ too much moustache wax, in my opinion…”

 

            The Doctor paused. Peri wasn’t listening to him. That wasn’t _entirely_ unusual, but he couldn’t help to be annoyed. At least, until he saw the expression on her face and constructed a theory as to how he lost her attention.

            Peri’s gaze was fixated sharply on the staircase, her eyes dilated in fear and her breathing shallow. Had she been like this every time she hallucinated, or was this another example of the hallucinations progressing? The Doctor silently cursed himself for not paying more attention to her before this.

            “Peri..?” he asked gently.

            This was distressing. Whatever she was seeing had clearly shocked her to the extent she was now catatonic, or at least non-responsive. He wanted to bring her out of it, but rather didn’t like the idea of giving her a shock, it might damage her mind to be brought about so sharply. And striking her was out of the question; even had his temperament permitted it.

 

            Peri stared ahead, watching a tableau only she could see. The hallucinations had started again. Now, she saw a pair of humans on the top of the stairs—well, humanoids at least, they were too far away for her to say what species they were for certain; she could think of a half-dozen species that looked almost exactly like humans, especially from a distance. But she was sure that there was a male and a female, the female was significantly shorter and slighter than the male and both of them were dressed entirely in flowing, diaphanous white garments. There was eerie and disjointed about the way they moved, like they were on film that was running backward or playing at the wrong speed. Or skipping. The first thing that came to Peri’s mind was ghosts in old horror movies she had watched in high school; pale, silent figures wandering through the background of old houses while screaming college students questioned their choice in weekend activities. Close on the heels of that impression was that of a bridal couple. Though she did suppose there was nothing that would stop ghosts, particularly ghosts in horror movies trying to freak out teenagers, from dancing in their wedding clothes.

            Yes, that’s exactly what they looked like. Dancing ghosts, waltzing blithely down the steps of the curved staircase. The woman’s dress and veil fluttered around her, lighter than silk and hanging in the air around them. Peri even thought she could hear the faint echo of a music box as she watched them dance. Perhaps that was just because there was something clock-like about their movement; not in that they were limited in their motion like clockwork dolls, but she thought that perhaps every second or so there was a tiny skip where they moved slightly faster for the time it would take for the sound of a tick to register in her ears. It might have been a bit romantic if Peri hadn’t noticed that the man was holding a knife in the small of the woman’s back.

 

            “Peri!” the Doctor whispered urgently, taking her face in both of his hands and training her eyes on his. She didn’t blink, but rather took a long, shuddering breath.

 

            The ghosts came further down the stairs, not breaking their dance for a step. Peri found herself wondering if they were even touching the floor at all. They paused on the middle landing, silhouetted against a vine-covered window. There, the couple embraced, holding the position so long Peri felt a little awkward watching them even though she was fairly sure they weren’t real. Whether they were real or not, they probably wouldn’t have been pressing their bodies together _quite_ so insistently if they knew that someone was watching them. The bride rose on her toes and her husband bent his face to hers. It was hard to tell because the woman’s veil obscured their faces, but Peri was quite certain that the pair had kissed although there was something odd about the angle she couldn’t work out from this distance.

            Then, quite suddenly, the man spread his arms and flung the woman into the window.

            “Stop him!” Peri shouted. The vision faded.

 

            “Peri!” the Doctor cried, fixing her gaze on his face. Peri blinked rapidly a few times and finally managed to focus on the Doctor.

            “Doctor—” she gasped.

            “You were hallucinating, everything’s alright now…” he soothed, stroking her hair. “Well, strictly speaking I don’t know whether or not you were hallucinating and I haven’t any idea if either of us is in any danger… oh, do take that last statement for the tone and not the content!”

            Peri took several long breaths, trying to clear her head. The Doctor, feeling monumentally useless, continued to stroke her hair. He wasn’t sure if he should ask her what it was she saw, it had clearly upset her a great deal. He cleared his throat awkwardly and gazed down at Peri.

            “I fear your condition may be deteriorating.”

            “What?” she asked, looking up at the Doctor.

            “…ah, well… You were petrified, Peri. Transfixed.”

            “Great.” said Peri, breaking away from the Doctor. She skulked away from him. “First I’m hallucinating, now I’m transfixed. What’s happening to me, Doctor?” The Doctor hurried back to Peri’s side, and though she would not face him he still held her as comfortingly as he could manage.

            “I swear to you, Peri, I _shall_ discover the nature of what’s happening to you and put an end to it! I _shall_ free us from this madhouse—”

            “—and return us to out usual one⸮” Peri scoffed, brushing his hands away.

            “Peri-” the Doctor started weakly.

            “I’m not interested in hearing any promises to protect me!” Peri snapped. “I’m finding a way out of here, and you can help me or not, but I don’t _care_ how upset you are that we haven’t found it yet!”

 

            The Doctor opened his mouth to argue, but closed it. He wasn’t sure if it was that she was right or that there was no reasoning with Peri when she got like this. It was probably both.

            “Alright.” he said at length. “Let us find a way out. That is assuming you’ll accept my help, of course.”

            “Well, I wasn’t going to just leave you here, no matter how insufferable you’re being.” Peri replied. She found herself smiling when she said that, quite against her will. Wasn’t she _just_ yelling at him? That was the Doctor for you, she supposed. Any conversation with him tended to run through the full gamut of emotions before one of them stormed off.

 

            “Right, well, there’s no sense going over what we already know, so let’s start with what we don’t know.” he started. “I’ve told you what I saw while you had your last spell, so perhaps…” Unsatisfied with the curl he’d been tugging all day, he wrapped a hand around his neck to fiddle with the hair on the opposite side of his head.

            “…I should tell you what I saw while I was hallucinating.” Peri finished.

            “If you would be so kind, my dear.” he agreed. “And do be so kind as to describe all symptoms, not just what you saw. Any detail, no matter how trivial it might appear to you, may be crucial to our escape. I cannot stress this point enough.”

            “I don’t think there’s any physical symptoms, I don’t even notice that what I’m seeing isn’t real until it goes away. Everything seems perfectly real until it’s not.”

            “Surely you must have noticed a physical event in this last episode.” the Doctor insisted. “You were catatonic, unresponding until I turned your eyes into mine. Every bit one of those wretched slumbering maidens your planet loves to put into stories for some reason.”

            "No! I mean--" Peri shook her head. "I mean, my head's clear, I feel perfectly normal, I just keep seeing things that can't be there."

            "That's not necessarily true." he said gently, stroking her head comfortingly. "Just because you're hallucinating doesn't mean what you're seeing isn't real."

            "But Doctor," Peri protested, "Isn't that _exactly_ what hallucinating means?"

            “And what were these visions you saw?” the Doctor pressed, ignoring Peri’s question. “Perhaps we might be able to reason out the nature of the beast with a touch more information on them.”

 

            Peri took a breath and rubbed her forehead while she collected her thoughts.

            “Okay, so I’d only just seen the furniture turning into ghosts and dancing around the room…”

            “Oh, don’t use the word ‘ghosts’, please.” the Doctor requested, raising his hands. Peri cocked her head.

            “Does it bother you?” she asked. “You’re a scientist. You shouldn’t be scared of things like ghosts, they aren’t real, and anyway, I was just using the word because that’s what they looked like.”

            “That’s not it at all, Peri. ‘Ghost’ is a technical term used in time travel and I think it might confuse the situation. Clearly time travel is at the root of at least one of our various problems.”

            “Oh.” said Peri. She frowned a bit, digesting this information. “So, what’s a ghost? How would I know if I actually did see one?”

            “A ‘ghost’ is the technical term for events that have escaped from their own timestream. If you see events taking place out of order, you are seeing ghosts.”

            “So when did you coin that phrase?”

            “Peri, ‘ghosts’ is a widely respected technical term for a phenomena noted by many people researching the field of time travel and-“ he caught the expression on her face and frowned. “In my third incarnation, if you _must_ know. Really, you ought to be a little more honoured to know such a prominent figure in this field.”

            “Well, thank you for the science lesson, Doctor. Do you have anything else to teach this week, or should we wave goodbye to the kids?” Peri smiled sweetly.

            “Your sarcasm is noted, my dear girl.” the Doctor muttered. “Tell me more about the… about what you saw after you saw the furniture behaving oddly.”

            “…okay.” Peri bit her lip thoughtfully. “Well, we were talking, you started rambling about surrealism, and then I saw these two people behind you on the stairs. It looked like a bride and groom. From Earth. Probably a bit before my era, it’s hard to say when they’re dressed up like that. Well, at least they were humanoid, I don’t know if they were really from Earth or what.

They were dressed all in white, big flowing veil and dress on the girl, big white frock coat on the guy. And they were dancing.”

            “No top hat?” asked the Doctor.

            “What?”

            “The man. Was he wearing a top hat? It sounds a bit like a bridal couple but if that were so the man really ought to have been wearing a top hat.”

            “You’re really old-fashioned for someone from the future, has anyone ever told you that?” asked Peri, wrinkling her nose. “Lots of people don’t wear hats when they get married. And I thought that they looked like they were getting married. Or that they were a couple of ghosts from some B-movie _about_ people who got married. And died right after. _Especially_ when the groom picked up the wife and threw her out the window. Yes, I did just say ‘ghosts’ again. Deal with it. Oh, and I saw something glinting in his hand, I think he might have had a knife.”

            “Good Gallifrey!” the Doctor commented. “I suppose that’s why you cried out ‘stop him’ just before you came round?”

            “Yeah. I guess I wasn’t thinking.” Peri shook her head. “I should have figured out they weren’t really there, part of me knew it, but…” She expelled a huff of frustration. The Doctor discovered he was rubbing her hands again, but didn’t see a reason to stop. Peri certainly didn’t seem to mind.

            “They don’t look like mirages or hallucinations, they look… well, real. As real as anything else I’ve seen…” Peri paused to laugh bitterly. “ _Realer_ than some of the things I’ve seen, none of those rubbery, bloated things we keep running into… My point is, I knew it was a hallucination, but I keep reacting as if they aren’t.” She bit her lip angrily.

            “And I don’t think that’s anything having an effect, I think that’s _me._ Me losing control and doing stupid things.” Peri finished. The Doctor regarded her sadly and slid his hand up her arm. When he touched her chin, she looked up into his eyes. She could guess what he was thinking easily enough; how much he understood what that was like and how little he wanted it to be happening to her.

            “You’re not doing anything stupid.” the Doctor said softly. Peri snorted humourlessly.

            “For once, you mean.” she added. He laughed quietly and patted Peri on the shoulder.

            “Perhaps there’s a truth in that, but-”

            “Oh, I’m not saying that I _am_ stupid, that you normally don’t mind saying I am.” she explained. Peri moved towards the staircase.

            “You’re not a stupid girl, Peri, you simply do stupid things.”

            “I can think of one stupid thing I won’t be doing if we don’t get out of here.” she grumbled. The Doctor turned on his heel and looked at Peri, trying to soss out if she actually just said that.

            “…only one?” he said at length, laughing in pure shock.

 

            Choosing not to answer, Peri picked her way across overgrown floor, almost but not quite losing a shoe as she hopped her a small patch of the ivy, presumably fallen from the ceiling.

            “What are you doing, Peri?” The Doctor asked, not yet ready to follow her. For now, he was content to watch her cross the floor ahead of him. Perhaps a bit more than just “content”. The Doctor dismissed that thought even quicker than usual; having established her as physically normal he really ought to focus on her mental state.

            “I want to get a closer look at this staircase.” she answered. The Doctor folded his hands into his trouser pockets and followed calmly after her.

            “Is there any reason behind this sudden investigation into the architecture?” he asked.

            “I don’t really know yet, I guess…” Peri frowned. “I think it’s… the dust. I want to reassure myself that even though I saw it like it was real, it didn’t happen.”

            “And you reason that if you had in fact witnessed an attempted murder, that there would be some sign of a struggle in the dust?” the Doctor asked, leaning closer.

            “There was no struggle.” Peri replied. “He just picked her up and threw her out the window. It almost looked like she hung in the air for a second, but that’s when I stopped seeing it.”

            “It could be that the last image of a frightening tableau cementing itself in your mind.” the Doctor mused. “Not likely, I’ll grant you, but perhaps something to consider.”

Peri frowned.

            “Yeah, I don’t think that’s likely either, Doctor.” She shook her head. The Doctor overtook her and continued to the stairs himself.

 

            The banister and stair were as completely covered in dust as the floor, though the mixture of dust to pollen gradated as it reached the second floor. Further up the stairs, the pollen faded to a paler colour, from an almost glowing chalky white-cream to pure white. This pollen was either that of a different plant or being replaced by dust entirely. Peri tried not to think of it as all colour and life fading out of the house the further they explored into it, but once the thought had occurred, it was hard to forget. Scant cobwebs hung in tatters from the furthest banisters.

 

            “There’s no way that someone climbed up these stairs, Doctor.” said Peri, her hand hovering over the banister. “This pollen hasn’t been touched.”

            “We can’t rule that out entirely until we reach the landing.” said the Doctor, looking over his shoulder. “If the people had come from upstairs, then there would be no marks until past the landing. What direction did you say they came from?” Peri cast a quick glance up the staircase.

            “The left.” she answered, pointing at the shadowy spot she’d first seen the dancing figures.

            “Perhaps this might compromise the ‘crime scene’ as it were, but the entire point of this is to satisfy to your mind that no crime took place.”

            The Doctor stepped onto the staircase, his gaze fixed on the rose window over the landing. The treads groaned slightly under his weight but bore it. Part of him was grateful for the sound; it had been entirely too quiet in this house without the creak of floorboards under his feet. Peri followed him a few steps behind, but she had barely made it to the third stair before he paused.

           

            “Although… there’s a thought.”

            “What is?” asked Peri.

            “What if you _were_ seeing ghosts?” the Doctor asked. He twirled acrobatically on the stair, hopping down to Peri’s level.

            “I’m guessing you don’t mean ‘dead people’.” Peri smiled wryly. “If there were a bunch of things escaping from their timestream, why would I be the only one seeing them?”

            “Why would you be hallucinating?” retorted the Doctor.

            “Does that mean… that at some point, someone actually _did_ kill their wife? Here, in this house, I mean?”

            “I should hope not, Peri, but if he did, I can’t imagine there’s anything that can be done for it now.” The Doctor frowned sadly. “I don’t suppose it’s outside the realm of possibility that such a thing did happen. Humans seem to delight in destroying each other, claiming a special affection for any particular person doesn’t seem to slow them down overly much. And I can see you biting your lip, I know fully well what you’re thinking and I would appreciate it if you would stop thinking it.”

            “I didn’t say a word!” Peri protested hotly.

            “Well, continue not to say it! That was an entirely different scenario!” the Doctor snapped. He turned his face away and puffed out a few meaningless syllables of annoyance. He turned back to face her, pressing his lips together tersely.

            “It is considered good manners, Perpugilliam, _not_ to make things more difficult for those who are attempting to help you and I would very much appreciate it if you observed this simple courtesy!”

            “Really⸮” she asked with an ironic laugh. “Is this something you’ve heard recently⸮”

 

            The Doctor bit his lip and chose not scream at her. Really, he made a saint of himself for this woman and she chose not to notice it. It was all his fault for putting up with it really, but that was the inevitable result of this sort of affection. The Doctor was usually much better at avoiding it, but that ship had long since sailed.

            “…more to the point,” he continued icily, though his tone warmed somewhat as he got distracted by what he was saying, “I don’t see why it would be that you would see a ghost, ghost here meaning an event separated from its timestream, of course, and I did not. In fact, as a timelord, I ought to be more sensitive to that sort of thing than you. It was, in all probability, another wisp of phantasmagoria, such as you’ve been seeing since we entered this house.”

            “Great.” Peri muttered, rolling her eyes. “So I just have to go back to confirming with you whether or not I’m hallucinating. Fun.”

            “I’m afraid so, Peri.” he nodded. He tried to wear a brave face for her sake. “Fear not, my dear, I shall do my best to keep you informed of reality, you merely need to alert me whenever you see something unusual.”

            Peri nodded in response, but almost immediately after she froze like a deer in headlamps.

            “Doctor!” Peri whispered urgently, gripping his sleeves. Her stare fixated on him. “I-I’m seeing something. I don’t know if it’s real, it’s too strange, it can’t be but I could swear it’s right there!” The Doctor touched her arms firmly, willing his companion to be calm even though the tone of her voice alone was nearly enough to send him into a panic.

            “What do you see? It is threatening?”

            “I see… it’s a man! He’s tall… he’s big… it can’t be real, there’s no way anyone would actually _make_ a coat like that!” The Doctor’s expression quickly soured.

            “That’s not funny.” he muttered darkly. Peri smiled anyway.

 

            The Doctor released his grip on Peri and descended a step lower on the stairs.

            “Seriously though, Doctor. I don’t see how I can tell what I should ask you what’s real or not, pretty much everything here is weird enough that it’s worth asking about. Even you.”

            “Do let’s not go down that route, Peri. Existentialism is quite alright to discuss around a fireplace after dinner, but I don’t think that this is quite the setting for it.”

            “Not wanting to discuss philosophy while in mortal danger?” Peri smirked.  
”Who are you and how far do you think we can make it before the Doctor gets back?” The Doctor shook his head with half a smile.

            “I do believe that the Doctor went off to search for Peri. Do be a good girl and wait for him now that you’re back.”

            “Yeah, you’re definitely not the Doctor.” Peri laughed. “He knows better than to ask me to be a good girl.” The Doctor scoffed impatiently, which Peri took to mean that he didn’t have a retort. She turned away and took a few more steps towards the landing.

 

            Peri wasn’t sure if she wanted to find anything there or not. She _was_ sure that all that she saw was just another hallucination, and that she wouldn’t see anything more unusual than what she’d been seeing all day on the landing of the stairs. That covered a wide variety of possible things she might encounter, but at least she was fairly sure that it wouldn’t be real. And if it was, the Doctor would tell her. That made Peri grimace inwardly. It’s not that she didn’t _trust_ the Doctor, at very least she trusted him to do what he thought was the right thing, but the idea of being dependant on him as a check for one of her own senses made her feel helpless in a way she couldn’t begin to express.

            The pair reached the landing. Dust lay over the ground in heavy swaths, blanketing the parquet and marking their progress up to that point. And of course, proving that there wasn’t anyone on the stairs a few seconds ago. Peri took a long breath and exhaled it in frustration.

 

            “Surprise, surprise.” she muttered. “The people who suddenly disappeared weren’t standing where I thought they were. It’s almost like they were just another hallucination.”

            “Perhaps, but for what its worth, it does appear that not quite everything you took for delusion is indeed such.” the Doctor said as comfortingly as possible.

            “Not everything?” Peri repeated. “I’m guessing you’re not talking about the flying spoons here.”

            “Your mounting book, Peri!” the Doctor exclaimed, gesticulating. “The first thing you saw which alerted you to unusual activity!” Peri’s eyes grew wide.

            “That happened before you blew that pollen in my face!”

            “We must accept that either the pollen is not what caused this condition or that you actually witnessed the dead plants you had pressed returning to life.”

            “Well… we do know that my cutting book was covered by plants, and that I saw plants cover it. So if I have to guess, I’ve got to go with I wasn’t hallucinating yet.”

            “As must I, Peri, as must I.”

            “Which does point to you shouldn’t have blown that pollen in my face.” Peri added darkly.

            “If I had any idea that it would have that effect on you, I would not have!” the Doctor protested defensively. “Furthermore, I’ve inhaled nearly as much as you have and it doesn’t seen to be having an effect on me at all.”

            “Well, maybe you didn’t get enough to have a reaction, or it doesn’t affect timelords.” suggested Peri. “And yes, there’s a lot of pollen everywhere, but I don’t think it’s all from the same plant. For all we know, what I inhaled was a mix of two different plants. Hell, it could have been five plants and a mold spore. And that’s not even bringing the splicing into it.”

            “True.” the Doctor agreed. “You did notice rather a lot of splicing in the conservatory, and it’s clear that plants have spread throughout the house. But there is nothing to be done for the fact that you are hallucinating and I am not at the moment. We ought to be focusing on why the house separated itself from the outside. It’s bound to all be connected, in any case.”

 

            He turned his head to look up into the shadows of the top stairs.

            “Is that where you first saw the dancers, Peri?” the Doctor asked. “It looks to be about the way you were facing.”

            She turned and nodded.

            “Yeah, I think so. They were sort of in shadow first…” Peri frowned. “Which is kind of weird, now that I think about it. If it was a mirage, how come it was hard to see in the shadows? I mean, their feet didn’t even touch the stairs all the time! Why should the shadow show on them?”

            “Peri, hallucinations originate in the mind, and I had had insight to your mind, my life would be much simpler in many regards.” the Doctor replied coolly. He approached the stairs.

            “Doctor, be careful. I saw people walking on those stairs, but that doesn’t mean that they can actually support our weight.”

            “I’m not climbing up these stairs…” the Doctor replied soothingly, “Not just yet, at any rate.” He moved closer to the corner where the landing joined the stairs. The banisters met at ornate knewlpost, almost as thick around as Peri’s waist at its widest part. It was carved lavishly with acanthus and other floral designs, which provided an ample and ironic hold for the climbing vines that covered it. Some of the plants looked nearly ready to bloom, which made Peri a bit wary. She’d already gotten enough trouble from pollen today. Old webs, probably left by some insect, crossed the lattice of vines and connected the carvings to the plants, the plants to the banister, hanging off of the knewlpost as if they were tethering it in place.

 

            The Doctor paused, closely examining the knewlpost.

            “Peri…” he said warily. “I would very much like it if you would be so kind as to render me the same service I’ve been providing you for this particular escapade.” Peri blinked.

            “You need me to confirm something is real?” she asked.

            “If you’d be so kind, could you watch that knewlpost for a moment and tell me what you see.” said the Doctor. “If I am correct, as I fear I am, it does not appear that the acceleration is limited to plant growth.”

 

Peri moved closer to the knewlpost, careful not to actually touch it. Suddenly as if she’d been bitten, Peri pulled back. Something in the twisting network of vines had moved. Now that she was watching closely, she saw more movement. And more. The knewlpost was all but alive with faint motion.

            “There’s something in the vines.” said Peri quietly.

            “I rather feared there was.” replied the Doctor, reaching into his coat. Slowly, he drew out his umbrella from an interior pocket the way a knight draws a sword, even going so far as it hold it out protectively in front of himself and his companion. Peri smiled bitterly to herself; how was it she even noticed that she was hallucinating when she was perfectly used to a man carrying a full-sized umbrella in his jacket pocket?

            Carefully, the Doctor extended his umbrella to the knewlpost, pausing just before the tip touched the vines.

            “I really do not recommend what I am about to do as a method of exploration, Peri.”

            “Trust me Doctor, I never plan on copying half of what you do if I have a choice.” she laughed mirthlessly. Satisfied, the Doctor gave a likely-looking gap in the leaves a prod with the tip of his umbrella.

 

            All at once, the air was alive. The creatures poured from the knewlpost in a stream, thin and dense at first, but soon spreading through the air like feathers torn from a pillow. Peri gasped in a mixture of surprise and wonder and the Doctor gripped her shoulder nervously. His grip relaxed quickly, but not before Peri had noticed.

            “You alright, Doctor?” she grinned.

            “I was _surprised_ , Peri. I hadn’t expected there to be quite so many.”

            “It’s okay, Doctor, I’ll protect you from… what are these things?” She leaned forward to try and find one that was holding still enough to allow her to get a good look at it. This got easier as the swarm thinned, and on closer inspection, Peri regretted making fun of the Doctor’s surprise.

            A green and pink example paused on the railing, fanning its wings slightly while it sat. The creatures looked like a cross between moths and jumping spiders, desperately trying to be cute. Their bodies were covered in thick down with four gleaming green eyes under fluffy plume-like antennae. Both the bodies and the wings were rounded and pale, with just barely discernible markings on the upper side. In a group, they appeared to be uniformly white, but examined singularly, it became clear that there was an infinite variety in patterns and colour combinations, allowing for the fact they were all powder-pale.

 

            “Have you ever seen the like, Peri?”

            “Have I ever seen pastel moth-spider things?” she repeated sceptically. “No, I was kinda hoping you had.”

            “No, I haven’t.” the Doctor said quietly, bending at the waist to examine the dosing green and pink. “I suspect they are unique to this planet. Fascinating.”

            Almost as if the creature had noticed it was being watched, it folded back it’s wings and bounced into the air like a dome popper. The Doctor straightened suddenly. Apparently it didn’t just _resemble_ a jumping spider.

            “Oh look.” Peri said weakly. “Vertical takeoff.”

            “Indeed…” agreed the Doctor carefully, being quite sure not to look startled just because a spider with wings jumped past his head while he was looking at it. “Is it in my hair?”

            “No, Doctor.” Peri laughed. He relaxed visibly.

            “What a charming life-form…”

            “Like the glow-bugs.”

            “Much like the glow-bugs!” the Doctor agreed. “Not just in that they are small insects… or arachnids, it’s hard to say given that they have a mixture of features.” The Doctor shook his head, returning his umbrella to the pocket it came from.

            “Eight legs _and_ antennae.” he mused. “Very well. I once had a four-legged ant whom was terribly fond of me. Why not an eight-legged moth? Or perhaps a winged spider. Either way, I can’t help but notice that both forms of life we’ve found on this planet, besides the plants of course; are small, harmless, and perfectly charming.”

            “And really look like somebody stuck together two different bugs and said ‘that looks cute’.” Peri wrinkled her nose.

            “I take it you disagree?”

            “I told you: flying spiders are _not cute_. Do you think those things have been in the house all along?” Peri asked. The Doctor scoffed.

            “Of course they have!” he tutted. “Where would they have come from? They are just as trapped as we, after all.” Peri frowned.

            “That’s not much of a reason. And if they did just get in, then that might mean we might be able to get out the same way.” Peri argued. She glanced back at the arachnoids. “Admittedly, we might not be able to fit…”

            “Do you think they just got in?”

            “Well, no…” she admitted. “I’m just trying to keep thinking, isn’t that exactly what you keep telling me to do?” Peri put her hands on her hips expectantly. The Doctor waved this off with a rude noise.

            “In any case, _I’m_ sure they haven’t just got in.”

            “How do you figure?” asked Peri. “And how is it better reasoning than mine?”

            “Because, Peri…” the Doctor asked, pausing to look intensely at a point behind his companion. “I don’t believe that knewlpost has always been covered with cobwebs. I fact, I rather think it had fewer before we came up this far.”

 

            Peri fixated on the knewlpost. It looked as if it _might_ be different from when they first passed it, but she wasn’t sure. Part of her wished that she had been paying more attention to that particular feature, but that part was quickly silenced by the part of her which knew perfectly well what kind of day she’d been having and how many tiny recesses this giant room had.

            “I’m not sure if it’s changed or not—but now that you’ve mentioned it, that’s all I can think about. Thanks _a lot,_ Doc.”

            “Well, if you see it come to life and change before your eyes and I do not, that will provide evidence that your thoughts affect your visions.” he answered matter-of-factly. “In which case I will apologize for speaking of ghosts just before you saw them overtake the foyer.”

 

            Most of the movement on the knewlpost had stopped, more or less. The arachnoids had spread across the foyer and into recesses throughout the house. There was no longer a swarm as such, but several examples of the species had returned to nesting behaviour among the vines climbing up the staircase. A green and blue was in the process of starting a new web between two uprights of the railing, having abandoned the nest the Doctor touched. It was making excellent time, considering that the creature was roughly the size of a bottle-cap. As far as she could tell from this point in the construction, the finished web wouldn’t resemble a spider’s web so much as tent caterpillar’s webs, the sort that blighted trees one branch at a time. Peri bit her lip. She was fairly sure they would have been covered in a lecture if her three-month break from college hadn’t turned into—well, this. Oh, she was learning much more this way, but that didn’t stop her from wishing she knew a bit more about tree blights.

            “I suppose, that’s what moths and spiders have in common…” Peri reasoned, eying the creatures warily. “They both spin webs… Do you think these are what made the webs that we found in the library?” Peri asked. The Doctor touched his mouth thoughtfully.

            “It stands to reason that something that’s not quite either would as well. I do suppose it’s possible.” he admitted. “Yes, surely something made those webs, just as these are making the webs now. And the webs are clearly similar in construction to those we saw either, thick and sheet-like. Yes, Peri, I do think I’m quite right in hypothesising that these arachnoids are indeed what built the webbing we saw in the library.”

            “Glad you talked yourself around on that.” Peri murmured, rolling her eyes.

            Peri straightened to her full height and looked pointedly at the Doctor.

            “Doctor, if those things cover the rest of the house in those webs, I’m going to remind you that they did it because you poked their nest.”

            “I’m sure it’s not a nest…”

            “I’m sure that if they showed up in my dorm, there would be girls hiding under the bed screaming for me to set fire to the web.” Peri replied, scowling at the Doctor.

            “Oh, what nonsense!” the Doctor scoffed. “I’m positive they’re quite harmless! What they remind me of is… oh, what are they called… what are they called… they were a fad on your planet, around your time, I think…”

            “Space Invaders?”

            “No, no no, they were a toy… perhaps with a cartoon show?”

            “Care Bears?”

            “No no no, nor the ponies…”

            “Cuddlesome?”

            “No no… they’re cute and cuddly and you can stick them in a ball…”

            “Popples?”

            “No no, they were colourful cockfighting for children, and then… oh of course! You wouldn’t know; I’m two decades out from your era! Still, in the grand scheme of history, that’s not a far leap. Nevermind. It hardly matters what line of toys they look like.” The Doctor rammed his hands in his pockets. Peri winced visibly. Two decades out. So, nothing she played with as a child, but something her children would. Of course, that was providing she got out of here. And had children. Peri pushed that thought from her head. She liked children and had often imagined herself with them when she was older, but that was a totally different life than the one she currently had. That was a life _after_ the Doctor. Peri didn’t think much of the idea of a life after the Doctor or the fact the only way she would have a child involved spending some time with someone her own species. She didn’t need to think about that; she was depressed enough as it was.

 

            “Perhaps we should press on.” the Doctor suggested. “I hardly think we can question these creatures as to the nature of your episodes.” He gestured towards where Peri had first seen the dancing ghosts.

            “Yeah, let’s go upstairs.” Peri agreed. “Those bug things are creeping me out.”

            “Really?” the Doctor asked, holding out his hand. One of the arachnoids landed on his knuckle. “I would have thought you’d find them… _sweet_.”

            “They’re flying spiders! There is nothing cute about tarantulas with wings!”

            “Not tarantulas, Peri. They’re a completely different species. Anyway, I fancy they look more like salticids.” He examined the insect closely, smiling. “No apparent stinger, if they are veneniferous at all, any venom must be stored in the pinchers. Not much of those, either, I’d suspect these mainly survive on those phosphorescent singing flies we saw earlier.”

The Doctor grinned mischievously at his companion.

            “An American botany student would be a rare treat, don’t you think Peri?” She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms.

            “That would be a _lot_ more funny if that hadn’t happened last week.” Peri frowned.

            “Was that only last week? My word, how the time flies.” The Doctor spread his fingers elegantly and the creature flew away.

            “I think this _particular_ alien isliable to do that.” he turned his face to Peri and smiled wickedly. “That leaves the second, third and fourth most likely options. Two of which, as we’ve already discussed, is attempting to take you as bride or mistake you for mine. After that, it simply leaves eating you, well, both of us, probably…”

            “And the fourth option is ‘all of the above’.” Peri finished, spreading her hands with a false brightness. “Well, if the flying spiders tell you they want to marry and eat your wife, could you do me a favor and step on them? I’d be too busy worrying if I was hallucinating again.”

            The Doctor beamed down at Peri and stroked her hair affectionately. _That_ was the woman he’d entered this house with, the one with any luck he’d be returning to his ship with when he’d cleared away the cobwebs from her eyes. Peri smiled at him, then turned her eyes back to the last of the insects.

 

            “Still, _I_ think they’re creepy.” said Peri decisively. “I don’t think I’d even mind seeing weird alien things as much as things that look _almost_ like they come from Earth.”

            “Really?” asked the Doctor dryly. “How long have you been averse to creatures that superficially resemble Terran species?”

            “Oh, not _you._ ” Peri grumbled. “I can actually forget you’re not just a really weird guy sometimes.”

            “Well, if you’re going to insult me-”

            “Come on, Doctor, I thought you liked humans.”

            “More than my good sense should dictate, it appears.” he huffed, folding his arms. “I’m rather fond of cats as well, but I don’t think much of being mistaken for one.”

            “Then stop doing that.” Peri teased. “You look more like a cat who got its tail wet than a human right now.” She smiled, then frowned.

            “It just creeps me out because of the trees in the greenhouse, I guess.”

            “Oh?” asked the Doctor, turning towards her. “Why is that?”

            “Well—you know what I was saying about splicing trees? Some of these insects look a little like Earth insects got spliced together like trees… but that’s impossible. And really creepy, for that matter.”

            “That’s not quite true, Peri. Even on Earth the possibility of combining two dissimilar species is quite possible. Were I return you to exactly where you joined me, it would be likely you would see the first real strides towards genetic splicing in your own lifetime.”

            “Okay, so it’s possible.” Peri admitted even-handedly. “Still creepy.”

            “ ‘Creepy’? To you perhaps, but to these creatures its clearly their normal life cycle. Perhaps it was not always so, but these creatures hardly seem to mind their chimerical nature, so I don’t feel we are in a position to judge.” Peri frowned slightly, grudgingly admitting his point.

 

            “Regardless, I can’t imagine them doing us any harm, but do lets leave them alone in any case…” murmured the Doctor, turning towards the upper stairs. “We do have other things to consider.”

            “Like if these stairs will hold our weight?” Peri suggested.

            “Quite.” the Doctor agreed.

            “Perhaps I should go first, in case they can’t hold you up?”

            “I was rather thinking the reverse; that I ought to go first and we could assume anything that could hold my weight would hold yours.” said the Doctor tersely. “Let us not make this into yet another argument about my weight.”

            “But Doctor, your weight is _exactly_ what we’re talking about.” replied Peri with a smile. “If you’re concerned about breaking floors, maybe you should be watching your diet more closely.”

            “ _Peri_ -” the Doctor frowned. His companion made a show of wide-eyed innocence.

            “I’m only worried about your health, Doctor. Wouldn’t it be _dreadful_ if you went crashing through floors…”

            “That’s quite enough, Peri,” scolded the Doctor, ramming his hands in his pockets and skulking up the stairs. “If we got anywhere by trading insults, we’d be out of the blasted house by now.”

 

            The third stair creaked softly under the Doctor’s tread, but other than that they gave no signs of breaking beneath the travellers’ feet. Peri followed closely, drawing in her elbows to avoid as many cobwebs as she could manage. She quickly fell into step beside him as they moved towards the domed ceiling. The height of the upper landing felt about the third story of a building, but that was only because the foyer covered two stories at once. The further they moved away from the centre of the room, with its rose window and the hole where the chandelier had been, the darker it became. This also happened to mean that the plants thinned and the webbing thickened. Peri could now see that the banisters in this part of the house had rather attractive art-nouveau risers. Ironically, they looked more like fiddlehead ferns than anything else.

 

            “Doctor, do you still have that flashlight?” asked Peri, pulling more webbing out of her hair.

            “Stop fussing, Peri.” he scolded. “You’ll get more webs stuck on you if you squirm about like that.”

            “I just—ick! It’s in my hair!” Peri stopped moving to pull the offending web loose. It proceeded to stick to her hands instead. The Doctor sighed and watched her fidget.

            “Should I-”

            “You’ll only make it worse.” she grumbled, attempting to flick the substance off. “Just get the flashlight, Doctor.”

            “Why?” he asked.

            “Because I thought I saw something on the railing and I’m due for another hallucination.” she answered, rubbing the web off on her shorts. That got the Doctor’s attention. He turned around and looked at the banister.

            “Why, Peri, I do think you’re right. About seeing something, I mean, not about being due for an hallucination."

 

            The pair moved closer to the railing. The darkness beyond the walkway almost seemed to consume the light, like the pair had been walking along the edge of empty space. When they reached the edge, the Doctor balanced the flashlight on its end, pointing the beam at the ceiling. A faint puff of dust flew up around the base of the light as he set it down on the railing, swiftly recollecting around it. The light reflecting off of the cracked, water stained plaster ceiling provided enough illumination to inspect the remaining dust. It was a thin, harsh light, but enough to see what Peri had barely noticed as a blotch in the dim. It shone through every mote of dust the pair had raised and leeched what little colour hadn’t been muted out from the scene by the thick layer of dust.

            In fact, the only stark and clean lines in the entire room were the dark handprints left on the railing.

 

            “You didn’t touch the railing, did you Doctor?”

            “Even if I had, Peri, there’s two sets of handprints there.” he replied. “As I know that I did not, I doubted it was worth asking that you had. Besides, you were at my side the entire time. Neither of has gone near the railing.”

            Peri nodded. She didn’t really need the Doctor to confirm that much, even if she _was_ hallucinating. She’d been sticking closer to him than usual since the moving furniture. If her mind was that far gone, what was to say she wouldn’t dodge another inanimate object?

            “Doctor, is it just me, or do these handprints look… fresh?”

            “Rather. I would say that they couldn’t be older than a day. Quite possibly less, given that I’m assuming nothing growing in this part of the house drops pollen.” the Doctor frowned. “Well, look on the bright side, Peri.”

            “What’s that?”

            “You aren’t hallucinating at this _particular_ moment. On the other hand…” he hovered his own over one of the handprints as if it make a point, “We appear not to be alone.”

            Peri looked down at the handprints and took a breath that was not quite a shiver.

            “Great.” she said quietly.

 

            The Doctor moved inspected the prints closely.

            “There’s two sets of hands here…” he said softly, tracing a print with his finger an inch from the wood. “Look… here… and here…”

            The Doctor spread his hand over one of the prints, trying to arrange his fingers into roughly the position the hand that left that mark was in. Peri tried not to stare too obviously, it wouldn’t help anything if the Doctor suddenly thought she was transfixed again. Stupid arrogant alien with his striking profile and graceful hands. Why was she thinking about that now, of all times?

            “…Peri… give my your hand. Your right hand.”

            Peri moved close, nearly pressed against he Doctor’s back. Gently, he put his hand on her wrist and guided it towards one of the other handprints. Her shoulders tensed, Peri always forgot how cold the Doctor’s hands tended to be when he touched her. She knew it was probably because he was an alien and naturally had a lower body temperature, but she couldn’t help but feel there was some unwritten rule that doctors had cold hands.

            Delicately, he ran his fingers across the back of her hand, adjusting her fingers into the position of one the handprints. He slid his own hand back along her wrist, arranging his fingers so that the marks on the railing aligned with the shadows of their hands. Perfectly. Almost too perfectly to be real.

            “Someone was here… a man and a woman, I’d wager.” the Doctor mused. “And close to our heights. Hands are roughly proportionate to the rest of the body.”

            “That’s what they all say…” murmured Peri quietly.

            “Hush, Peri.”

 

            The Doctor eased their hands into another position, sliding his fingers under the pulse of her wrist and along the back. His hand moved to cover hers, easing his fingers into the gaps between hers.

            “Our friends look quiet comfortable with each other…” he mused.

            “They don’t look like they were in much of a hurry, either.” Peri added quietly, “Wouldn’t there be more smearing if they were running? I’d think you’d mainly be grabbing the banister if you were running past, but the marks are too clear for that.”

            Slowly, he took his hands away. Peri took a moment to compare the marks to her own hands. It was awfully close to the size of her hand. Maybe it _was_ the people she saw dancing, that woman’s build was very much like her own.

            The Doctor frowned.

 

            “Sadly, we cannot write this off as another one of your hallucinations. It’s clear that someone did in fact touch this banister.”

            “If this hadn’t been real, it would have been the third time that I saw something right out of a horror movie.”

            “How so?” asked the Doctor.

            “Oh, it’s something they do when they’re hunting ghosts. Apparently. In movies.” Peri explained. “They sprinkle talcum powder all over something and if ghosts touch it they leave handprints. I saw it on this late-night show about a train-track in Texas. I’m not saying that I _believe_ it, but apparently the ghosts of the little kids whose bus got hit by a train push any car that parks on the train tracks off.”

            “But any fool could tell that the talcum powder was simply being absorbed by the residual oils left on the car by previous handprints, surely?”

            “Well, this _was_ in Texas.” shrugged Peri.

            “And _why_ would someone park a car on the train tracks?” he asked.

            “To see if the ghosts of little kids would push it off.” Peri shrugged. “Also, Texas.”

 

            Peri drew her hands close, careful not to disturb the dust they were examining.

            “There’s no way we accidentally touched that banister, right Doctor?” she asked. “We aren’t just getting worked up over a mess we forgot we made?”

            “Of course not, Peri.” the Doctor confirmed. “We’ve only just come into this hallway, and we didn’t even approach the banister until you saw the handprints.”

            “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that those are _our_ handprints.” Peri bit her lip.

            “Well, if these aren’t our handprints, whose are they?” the Doctor asked reasonably.

            “I don’t know.” frowned Peri. “Maybe it’s that charming couple I saw dancing around here a minute ago⸮”

            It was at that moment that the Doctor’s flashlight gave up all attempts to balance on a curved surface. It fell from the handrail, tumbling into the darkness and tossing it’s light every which way. With a small, distant rattle, the tumbling stopped and that last light flickered out.

 


	6. I'd Rather Waltz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor finally works up a theory on what's happening to Peri, and the two of them make a welcome discovery.

            When the blackness had fully surrounded them, the pair stood in mute surprise for moment. It was unusual for them.

            “Now what?” Peri asked.

            “Now we decide whether to press on without light or to return to a better-lit room.”

Peri’s jaw dropped in disbelief.

            “You don’t mean that we just dropped our _only_ source of light?” she gasped. “Why didn’t you have anything else? What if we got separated?”

            “Why didn’t _you?_ ” he retorted.

            “Where would I put it?” Peri demanded, spreading her arms.

            “Didn’t you have a satchel when we came in here?”

            “I dropped it.” Peri huffed.

            “You dropped it? Whatever for?” he asked. Peri rolled her eyes.

            “I just thought it might things more interesting if I lost all of my samples and everything else I brought with me as soon as I came in!”     

            “Oh, there’s no time for that sort of thing!” the Doctor snapped.

            “Look, we all deal with losing our minds in different ways.” Peri offered with a too-bright grin. “You decided to dress like a poison frog, I mask my terror with sarcasm!”

            “What would you have me do?” the Doctor protested, spreading his arms. “Perhaps I ought to join you in spouting this nonsense?”

 

            Peri opened her mouth, raising her arms and preparing to speak. No words came, but after a moment she glared at the Doctor and shook her head as if she were giving him a right talking-to.

            “Is any of this gonna get us out of here?” she finally asked.

            “I’m afraid I don’t know, not at this point. There is very little way for us to know whether or not any of our actions will lead to our escape until such time as it does.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.

            “One way seems as good as the other at this point.” the Doctor murmured. “Do we return to the hall, which we know at least is lit and safe; or we press on, to see if our luck is any better in the unknown?”

            “Well, I guess there’s no real point in going back to the front hall,” Peri replied without enthusiasm. “We already know that if there’s a way out, it’s not the front door.”

            “Quite.” he agreed. “Further into the unknown, then?”

 

            The Doctor swept his arm grandly in the direction of the black hallway. It wasn’t so much that Peri could see what he was doing as she could see he faintest highlights edged his silhouette and she was familiar with his flair for the dramatic. She smiled with exasperated affection and hurried to meet up with him. She laid a hand against the wall as she trotted along, more to keep herself from running into it than anything else. It didn’t stop her from stumbling over what felt like a large root.

            “Are you alright?” the Doctor asked.

            “It’s just hard too see in this dim light.” Peri answered, pausing to rub her toe.

            “That’s bit odd, don’t you think?” said the Doctor. “I wouldn’t have expected there to be any light at all in this part of the house…”

 

            It was the Doctor who spotted it first. Towards the back of the hall, a thin beam of white light glowed under the edge of a doorway. He wouldn’t have thought that it wasn’t enough to let them see each other’s shadowy grey forms, even limited as their vision was.

            He touched Peri’s arm and gestured grandly towards the source of light.

            “Do you see that? At the end of the hallway, I think there’s a bit of light coming under the door. Shall we investigate?”

            “Unless you think there’s something else we should be looking for _in the dark.”_

            “Like moths to the flame?” the Doctor mused. He reached back and fumbled a bit until he had a grasp of Peri’s hand. Having a grip on her was more comforting than he thought it would be, and he immediately tightened his grip as if to reassure himself that she was still there.

            “Careful there, Doctor, I’m in danger of losing a finger.” Her tone was wry, but she squeezed his hand just as tightly in response. The pair moved towards the lighted door.

           

            “I shouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you, don’t think it’s terribly likely we’ll find an exit on the second floor.”

            “That’s true,” Peri admitted, “but I’d still like to stop tripping over my own feet for a minute.”

            “I fear that we will need far more than a window to accomplish that.”

            “Very funny. Okay, so it’s not a door but maybe we could break a window or something and get out that way. Or find a balcony and climb down, or… something.” she suggested, trailing after the Doctor. His free hand was still toying with that curl behind his ear.

            “The trouble is, Peri, if different times are isolated to different rooms, what’s to say that if we left from a window, the Tardis would have even gotten here by the time we got out?” the Doctor frowned. “We might be able to wait for it, true, but how long would we need to wait? How would we even know when we would come?”

            “I suppose it’s too much for you to know when we landed?” Peri sighed. The Doctor shook his head.

            “Relative to any given patch of time in this house? Yes, that is indeed more than I could say.” the Doctor replied. He led her forward through the dark hallway. Peri wasn’t sure if the Doctor’s night vision was any better than hers, or he was just more confident. _She’d_ have been plenty confident, too, if it weren’t for the hallucinations.

            “I’m afraid that I’d need to have a look at the Tardis’ instruments to even guess at that, and had I ability to nip in and check the readings, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

 

            The travellers reached the lit door. Having reached it, the Doctor felt a sudden apprehension. It was strange, and he wasn’t sure what caused it, but something about the doorways made him uncomfortable. It was hard to say why, he had hardly been comfortable running around this patchwork house even before he knew he was trapped, but the feeling suddenly intensified to the point that it nearly made him nauseous.

            All of the doorways disquieted him, but this one in particular raised the hairs on the back of his neck. The timelord wouldn’t have been able to put this feeling into words if he tried, the best that he could say was that this door was _wrong_.

            Without hesitation, Peri opened the door.

 

            A rich, tangerine-coloured light poured from the open door and lit the companions, violently highlighting the dark hallway behind them like a splatter of bright paint on the faded wood. Beyond the door lay a room as opulent as the library and the study had been, though not quite as decrepit. The elegant lines of the furniture was blurred by a layer of dust that would not have seemed nearly so thin if they hadn’t just explored the rest of the house. Chipped white moulding accented the ivory wallpaper. It had only just begun to peel, revealing copper-bright wood beneath. Moss covered the carpet, blurring the patterns that had already been darkened to near-blackness by water stains. Near the window stood a piano with it’s strings broken and winding out of the body, the ivory peeling off of the keys and revealing the wood beneath.

            The scene was lit by a bay window which framed the sunset, coils of a climbing plant not dissimilar to ivy just barely starting to break through the panes. This room would have looked almost homely compared to the rest of the house, if it were not for the view outside the window. Rather, what that view meant to the travellers.

 

            The Doctor strode across the floor in disbelief, his gaze fixed on the view outside the window. Peri just stood mutely in the doorway, willing the scene to change each time she blinked. If only the view outside the window was another hallucination. If only she could see the Tardis. Or the path that they’d taken to the house. Or the trees they’d fought through to get to the house.

            “The wood…” the Doctor gasped, “…the wood is gone…”

 

            It was quite true, of course. The larger, apricot-golden sun bent over the edge of the horizon, clear except for a shifting yellow grain like wheat. Above it, the smaller, sanguine star sunk after, like it had been caught in the clouds. The only sign they really had that they were looking at the same stretch of land that they had crossed was the stone fence surrounding the field, chest high on tall man and almost the height of a young woman. The same fence they’d climbed over to get to the house. The stones, which had been rounded, and falling out of place were now more neatly cemented to each other, though it was clear even from this distance that the mortar was starting to wear away. Beyond the gate, which could now been seen to have fallen off it’s hinges some fifty feet along the wall’s length, the field gave way to what clearly had been tended flowerbeds. Now the white flowers were in the process of pushing aside their small stone borders and escaping into what would become the path Peri and the doctor took to the house. It felt like hours since they’d crossed that area, but it was clear from the shape of the landscape that it had actually happened at least a dozen years into the future. A single, frail sapling at the corner of a flowerbed was all that suggested the woods that would consume the field and shield the house in its foliage.

 

            Peri moved forward and touched the crook of the Doctor’s arm. Even with the state she was in, she couldn’t help but the wonder how much better the Doctor was actually doing. Part of her still habitually worried after the Doctor’s state of mind. Peri wasn’t sure what she’d do for him if he fell into despair at this point, but she knew that neither of them would get anywhere until she did.

            “It is as I feared, Peri…” the Doctor said softly, not breaking his gaze. “We may have found the way out, but not the way back.”

            “Then…” she said unsurely. “Then we’ll find more windows.” The Doctor turned his gaze to her. She shrugged sheepishly.

            “Our only other choice is giving up, isn’t it?” she added. The Doctor smiled fondly at Peri. It sounded so trite when he said it himself, but when Peri was hopeful, it was much easier to believe her. He took both her hands in his own.

            “Not at all, my dear. Giving up is what is done for the lack of a choice. It has never been a choice itself.” He put his arm around Peri’s shoulders and turned back towards the door.

            “Come along, Peri. There were more doors in the hallway.” he announced. “We shall simply check each room in turn.”

 

            “Do let’s leave the doorway open, Peri.” suggested the Doctor as they left the golden room. “It’s hardly a lamp, but it’s a great deal better than nothing.”

            She nodded and kicked a loose piece of moulding that had fallen from the wall under the crack of the open door to keep it propped. Now that there was a bit of light in the hallway, they could see that the hallway did not end where they thought it did, but rather it forked in two directions along what the Doctor hoped was an exterior wall.

            “Which way, do you suppose?” the Doctor mused. “We ought to hug the outer wall, if we’re searching for windows.”

            “I don’t know, all these hallways look the same to me.” Peri griped.

            “That’s because it’s dark.” he replied dismissively, moving on to the next door.

 

            The Doctor thoughtfully paused in front of another set of doors. He opened the first one, and pale moonlight spilled out in long strip across the floor. He regarded it for a moment, then craned his head to look inside the door.

            “Are we going in, Doctor?”

            “Just a moment, Peri, I want to check something.” he mused, raising a hand to block her entrance. He moved to the next door over, less than a metre away, and opened it. Taking a step back, the Doctor examined his handiwork.

 

            Peri assured herself that really, there should have been nothing upsetting at looking at the two doors side by side. She knew for a while now that the different rooms housed different times inside, but seeing two different rooms, in two different states of decay, one lit by a single, faintly blue moon and the other by lit by a pair of mismatched suns was more unsettling than Peri cared to admit. She turned to the Doctor to try and make a joke about it, but stopped dead when she saw the look of terror on the Doctor’s face.

            “I’m still not sure whether or not your senses are to be trusted, Peri, but it is clear that mine are not.” the Doctor announced, his voice unsteady with shock. “I should have… felt this? Heard it? There isn’t a proper English word for it— _sensed_ there was something wrong?” He swept away from the door to pace the hallway.

            “Because you’re a timelord?” Peri guessed, trying to keep up both mentally, in that he had made a leap of logic and not explained it to her, and physically, in that he was throwing open other doors at random.

            “Time is my bailiwick, Perpugilliam.” he expounded. “While it is true that my research crosses dozens of fields, I am a bit of an expert on the subject of time travel, though I do say so myself. More to the point, yes, I _am_ a timelord; a member of a race that has time travel written into their blood. We have adapted—largely by way of genetic technology, I’ll admit, but we have adapted—certain senses specific to the work of time travel. To see if an event is fixed, to feel time flow around us like a current, and which way that current pulls us…” the Doctor trailed off, distracted. This slowed him down enough that Peri could get close enough to touch his arm. He looked surprised, as if he had forgotten she was there.

 

            “And you didn’t… um, _feel_ this?” Peri asked. “Why didn’t you mention any of this before?”

            “I didn’t notice!”

            “Didn’t you?” Peri asked. “In the greenhouse, you were the one who pointed out what time it was.”

            “I have seen all manner of things, Peri, creatures and phenomena that defy explanation—“ the Doctor shuddered, unblinking.

            “Doctor, you knew this was happening.”

            “Yes! I saw it as you did.” he said softly. “All along, we’ve been assuming that I would be able to validate your observations, but if I myself have lost a sense… and to have not noticed… it is like a limb going numb so slowly you don’t notice until you try to move.”

            “You can still— _function_ , can’t you?” Peri asked desperately. She placed a hand on his shoulder and tried to comfort him.

            “That depends entirely on your definition of ‘functioning’, Peri.” the Doctor sighed. “I have been leading you around this house, true, I have spoken with you, confirmed or denied whether or not you were seeing illusions, but will I be able to continue my work if— _once_ we return to the Tardis? No, my dear. Let us think no more of it. Let us consider only one terrible prospect at a time.”

            “We should check another room, Doctor.” Peri suggested firmly.

 

            He took several short breaths. Doing so, or Peri rubbing his shoulder, seemed to do him some good, and he smiled weakly at her.

            “I don’t suppose it changes our plan overmuch.” he sighed. “Onto the next door, and the next, until we can see the wood we left outside.” Peri trailed her hand from his shoulder down to his hand, where he grasped hers firmly. The pressed on towards the next door.

            “Perhaps it is the same spore that caused your hallucinations that affected my ability to sense time.” the Doctor mused. “We’ve been assuming it doesn’t affect timelords, but clearly it does, just not in the same way that it affects humans.”

            “So the pollen makes me see things and keeps you from telling time?” Peri asked.

            “That’s a rather drastic oversimplification, Peri, but yes.” the Doctor replied tersely. “It _has_ kept me from telling time.”

            “I’m don’t like describing all I’ve been experiencing as just ‘seeing things’ either.” She pursed her lips together thoughtfully. “I’m just thinking, in both cases it got into our heads and changed the how we saw the world…”

            Peri stopped walking and simply stared ahead. Part of her almost wanted another one of the hallucinations to leap out at her and scare her. Maybe it would shock her into properly feeling something. By necessity, the Doctor also stopped walked and glanced behind to see why the young lady holding his hand had stopped moving.

            “…how we defend ourselves from what we don’t recognise.” she mused.

            “There’s no sense in panicking.”

            “That’s the weird thing, though, Doctor. I’m not panicking.” Peri said, staring into the black distance. “I was for a while, and I kind of wish I still was; ‘cause I’d be more used to it. But I’m not. Remember when I said this place was like a nightmare? It’s more like one of those dreams, where all these weird things keep happening—and they _bother_ you, but it’s more like, ‘great, more crap to deal with, just what my day needed!’ and it’s not until you wake up you realise how creepy they are.”

            “That could be a form of shock, I suppose. Or perhaps one of these plants is having a anxiolytic effect on top of your hallucinations.”

            “Either way, I feel like I should be more upset about that than I am…” murmured Peri in a detached voice. She squeezed the Doctor’s hand, wrapping her fingers around his comfortingly. Peri smiled weakly at him and resumed walking. Part of him felt sick that she was comforting him when she was even worse off than he was. Another part of him wanted the first part to shut up because he desperately needed it.

 

            As they approached the next door, the Doctor cocked his head. There was a noise in the air, not so much like a hum as a low, rhythmic hiss like a faint breeze or the unwinding of rope. No, creaking. Now that the Doctor thought about it, it sounded more like the creaking of staves bending to accept weight on the end.

            “Steady a moment.” said the Doctor, holding out his hand. “Do you hear that?”

            “Hear what?”

            “Shh! Listen!” he insisted. Peri pressed her lips together, formulating a really cutting remark in her head, but she was distracted from that task by hearing what she could only assume was the noise the Doctor had heard.

            “It sounds a little bit like air being let out of a tire.” Peri commented.

            “Be on guard, Peri.” he said quietly, ushering her to the edge of the doorframe. Once he was quite sure that they were positioned so neither of them would be hit if something sprang out of the door like a jack from his box, the flung the door open. Or, rather, he attempted to, but vines clung and stuck to the door such that it took his full force to open it at all. Nothing sprang out at them, so they stepped into the doorframe and were struck dumb by the view of the room beyond.

 

            It was hard to tell at a glance what the purpose of this room had been, but the activity inside immediately put the Doctor in mind of a dancehall. Whatever it _had_ been, it was certainly large enough to serve as a ballroom, at very least the ballroom of a country estate that the Doctor had inadvertently been comparing this house to. While the lower floor itself was roughly the size of a public swimming pool, something about the bright light and the density of the plants made it seem larger. Whatever furniture it had ever held had been cleared away, leaving the blackened floorboards bare but for the variety of plants that had grown there.

            The doorway opened onto a landing that circled most of the room, a narrow and spindly staircase leading into the main section of the room. Thin vines crawled out of the keyholes of the glass-front bookcases that lined the upper landing. The entire room was brightly lit by a series of tall loft windows that comprised most of the south wall. At least Peri thought of it as the south wall, because the shattered glass panes let in the clear white sunlight of midday that southern exposure provided on Earth. There was no way for her to know whether or not that was true here. Either way, something about this quality of light made the contrast between where the light hit and where the leaves blocked it seem sharper. As it fell through the leaves, the clear light was stained the bright chartreuse of sunlight in a forest. On the bottom floor, so far as she could see from this angle, the glass-fronted bookcases had been replaced with floor-length mirrors. Each of them had cracked at least a little; most of them had shed their glass across the floor. The panes of glass that remained gave the room the impression of extending infinitely into the distance, each mess of vines appearing half a dozen times on the speckled glass. More of the vines and moss that they had observed all around the house swathed the room so entirely that the room looked more like a forest or jungle than part of the house.

            And, most remarkably, these flowering vines and climbing plants were climbing, and blooming, and wilting, and reseeding at a remarkable rate. In fact, the entire room was so alive with movement that both the Doctor and Peri had difficulty comprehending that these were actually plants and not more insects. The moss on the floor expanded and receded across the floor like an amoeba feeding. Vines climbed up the walls and collapsed, tall stalks shot toward the ceiling and bent over from their own weight. Pale purple flowers the size of saucers spun into existence and wilted to the floor before other buds on their own vine could raise their heads to the sun. Networks of vines climbed the mirrors and shed off the walls in sheets like skin. Entire life cycles played out in the matter of seconds. There was a rhythm to it all, steady as clockwork but something neither of them placed immediately, possibly out of shock.

 

            “Have you ever seen the like, Peri?” the Doctor asked, half awed and half fearful.

            “Yes.” she said firmly. The Doctor’s gaze snapped to her sharply, but Per kept her gaze on the plants.

            “Just a few hours ago. In my cutting book. There were less of them, but… they were growing just like this.”

            The Doctor turned his eyes back to the plants for a moment, watching the vines crawl over each other like snakes in a basket. Now why was it she hadn’t attempted to alert him to the situation before they were facing down a pit of plants that moved like living animals, he couldn’t fathom. Largely because she had attempted to do just that and the fact that he ignored her concerns simply didn’t register in his mind. The Doctor realised that he had reached up to toy with that same curl he’d been going after all day, so he aborted the action and placed his arm around Peri’s shoulders as if that was all he intended to do in the first place.

 

            “I won’t go so far as to say it proves the matter, but this does rather suggest that the first effect was not an hallucination of any sort.” mused the Doctor.

            “Well…” Peri agreed weakly, “That would explain why I saw it before I got a fateful of that pollen.”

            “It would at that. I will admit, that was the detail that most of my theories were catching on.” The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck. “If the pollen was causing you to see these visions, be they hallucinations or not, how is it that you started before you were exposed? I’m shocked that an answer this simple alluded me this long: they didn’t.”

 

            The Doctor gazed into the fray. Now that he expected to see it there, there was a rhythm and a sense to the tumbling assortment of leaves and vines. He would even go to say there was something beautiful about it, but it was beautiful in the same sense that a thunderstorm was: much of the beauty came from the awe that nature fundamentally overpowered progress. No matter how much they seemed at odds, or how much damage nature suffered, it always found a way to prevail, though usually not to the benefit of the observer. Seeing the plants grow at their own rhythm, a distinct beat seemed to form. Was that a natural part of the life cycle of all plants, unnoticed because it happened over the course of a season? Now that he watched it, each individual sprout grew at the speed of a lullaby, soothing and gentle, only fast in that it was a plant and he really shouldn’t have been able to watch it grow at all.

            “Peri, I do understand your distress, but as a student of botany, can you not appreciate seeing these plants enact their entire life cycles in the matter of moments? It’s fascinating, really.”

            “I think I just found something else you’ll find fascinating, Doctor!” said Peri, breaking into a hopeful grin despite herself. She pointed out of one of the shattered loft windows. Some fifty yards beyond the wall was the most welcome sight the Doctor could remember ever laying his eyes upon.

            “My Tardis!” he crowed. The Doctor tore his eyes from the ship and laughed aloud, lifting Peri into the air and twirling her around. Either despite of her surprise at suddenly being picked up or because of it, Peri threw her arms around his neck and laughed along with him.

 

            “Right!” the Doctor grinned, setting Peri on the ground. “Now it’s simply a matter of making it through this vigorous wood and safe home to the Tardis!”

            “Do you think it’s safe to enter this time zone, Doctor?” Peri asked. “If these plants aren’t actually growing any faster than normal, it just looks like it because time moves differently in this room, could we be hurt by moving that fast?”

            “Well, there’s one way to find out.” the Doctor answered.

            “You’re not thinking of going in there, are you?”

            “Certainly not.” the Doctor answered, rummaging in his pockets. Peri’s eye grew wide.

            “You’re not thinking of pushing _me_ in‽”

            “Peri!” the Doctor gasped. “What manner of man do you take me for?”

            The Doctor held up an apple.

            “I was looking for something perishable to throw.” he explained. “If this doesn’t rot as it enters the fray, then we can take that as evidence that a living organism can enter this timezone without it having a significant affect on our bodies.”

            He tossed the apple in the air experimentally.

            “A ‘significant affect’?” Peri asked with exasperation. The Doctor shrugged mildly.

            “All time travel affects our bodies to an extent, Peri. Why, even you have saturated enough background time radiation to register on most devices. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before.”

            “Yes, actually, I _do_ remember something about me absorbing radiation.” Peri “That kind of thing tends to stick my mind. What I don’t understand is if time is moving differently in each room, why we didn’t notice it before.”

            “Well, we wouldn’t have done.” said the Doctor simply. “You hardly notice a boat is floating down the river if you’re standing on the deck, but from the shore you can watch it pass.”

            “Maybe _you_ don’t.” Peri frowned. “I got sick every time Howard took me out on his boat until I was fourteen.”

            “What happened when you were fourteen?” asked the Doctor.

            “I stopped getting sick as often.” Peri shrugged. “Once I was able to actually stay up top long enough to see what was happening, I never really questioned it. I was too busy.”

            “Perhaps your centre of balance changed.” the Doctor suggested mildly.

            A vine writhed across the floor and began to work its way up the banister. The Doctor turned his eyes back to the apple in his hand and gave it one more experimental toss.

            “Do let’s send along our test subject, shall we?” he said, stretching his arm back. “Nothing ventured…” The Doctor sent the apple in a wide arc through the air like a cricket ball. It bounced along the mossy floor, spinning unsteadily until it hit a cluster of woody stems which had only just taken root. Moss crept towards the apple and roots expanded towards the fruit. First one tendril broke the red skin, then all at once the fruit began being torn apart by other plants very adamantly insisting to grow in exactly the place the apple was. White flesh broke and juices gleamed on new sprouts as they spiralled towards the ceiling. Another plant entirely burst out of the last unbroken piece of skin and spread to the floor. Within moments, there was not so much an apple as a pile of crushed fruit with leaves coming out of it that might have had an apple in it at one point.

            “Well… charming.” Peri grimaced, replacing the apple’s white flesh with her own bloody insides in her mind.

            “ _Yes_ ,” the Doctor admitted uncomfortably, “But not only was the experiment a success, we have gathered what I take to be rather useful information.” Peri gawked at him. The Doctor spread his hands as he explained what he thought was obvious.

            “This proves that we can enter the time zone without it affecting us.” he explained as a teacher would to a particularly dull student, “We will move at our normal speed, but the plants will keep moving at the speed they appear to be moving in relation to us. If there is an unusual behaviour in time in this room, it clearly already affects us.”     

            He glanced back at where the apple had landed.

            “Why, the apple seeds aren’t even sprouting.” he said hopefully. “I’m quite sure that’s a good sign.”

            “So we don’t have to worry about if we’ll get trapped in a loop where we move too fast to control our own actions or age to death or something; we only have to worry about being torn limb from limb by fast growing plants?”

            “Precisely, my dear.” the Doctor nodded uncomfortably. Peri rolled her eyes.

            “Oh, then _that’s_ a relief!” she grumbled sarcastically.

 

            The Doctor watched the plants carefully, an intense expression on his face. Peri was about to ask what had caught his attention when he spoke.

            “…it’s a waltz.” the Doctor said quietly.

            “What?” asked Peri.

            “The plants, they’re growing in rhythm.” He held out his hand and started making little movements in the air, like he was conducting an orchestra. Peri blinked, her eyebrows furrowed, and she began to hum something under her breath. The moment she heard her own voice adding a melody to the rhythm, it was unmistakable. Everything in the room was moving in time, following a very clearly set tempo with it’s own pauses and rhythm. Now that he mentioned it, it did follow the pattern not only the tune she was humming, but everything other waltz she could bring to mind. She might have noticed sooner, but Peri hadn’t personally learned to recognise musical rhythms, much less in plants.

           

            “What’s that?” the Doctor asked, turning back towards Peri.

            “What’s what?” she asked.

            “ _That!_ That tune you’re humming. It sounds familiar.”

            “Oh. It’s… it’s the tune I thought I heard before we found the wind chime.” she explained.

            “It falls perfectly into the rhythm these plants are moving in. Perhaps… well, I’ve already suspected that what you’re experiencing isn’t so much hallucinations as… reacting to stimuli your brain isn’t built to understand.”

            “…seeing what you’re not.” Peri finished carefully. “Patterns in time.” She rather didn’t like the idea of being inside a head like the Doctor’s, he barely seemed able to handle it most of the time and he was used to it.

            “But, the important part is not that our senses are impaired, but that we have found our objective. I’m quite sure that once I’m back in my own laboratory on the Tardis, it will be the matter of moments to cleanse our systems of this hallucinogen.”

            “Are you?” Peri asked.

            “Yes.” said the Doctor. “I’m quite sure we’ll be able to sort this all out, if we can make it to the Tardis.”

            “Okay.” nodded Peri calmly. “If you think you can fix this when we get back to the Tardis, then I believe you. We’ll get back and we’ll fix both of us up.”

            “Really?” the Doctor asked. “You’ll accept my word, simple as that?”

            “I know that you’ve stopped lying to me to make me feel better.” Peri murmured, carefully smoothing the Doctor’s lapels. Suddenly her grip on the fabric tightened and she looked directly into his eyes.

            “Because you _know_ I can tell when you’re lying.”

 

            The Doctor tried to shake the feeling that he had just been threatened and took a moment to square his shoulders. The rather poorly coloured picture of a gentleman, the Doctor took a step back, extended his hand towards his companion, and raised his chin.

            "Take my hand, Peri." said the Doctor, reaching out to her. "I'll lead."

            "Why?"

            "Because I'm taller than you, because I have the impeccable timing to navigate us through this moving topiary, because you seem to be hallucinating, and because the male is traditionally the one who leads in a dancing couple, and because I know how to waltz."

            "No, I meant 'why are we dancing at all'; not 'why do you want to lead.' "

            “Because I believe the rhythmic, turning movements of a waltz will keep us into the flow of the plants and because you haven’t a better idea!” he snapped. “Now stop arguing with me for once and take my hand or I shall stand here with my arm out like this until are too humiliated _not_ to!”

            “I’ll meet you halfway.” offered Peri, taking his hand. She smiled. “I’ll go along with this, but I won’t stop arguing.”

            “I would have been rather hopeful to have expected more.” the Doctor commented dryly. He slipped his arm around Peri’s waist and drew her against his chest.

            “Shall we?” he smiled, cocking his head ever so slightly. Peri felt she shouldn’t be smiling, given the situation, but it was very hard to watch the Doctor smile without mirroring the expression. Taking her smile as permission, he swung them into the room proper.

 

 

 

            The floorboards of the landing creaked beneath their feet, making almost the exact same noise that the roots did as they expanded into their path. Peri barely had time to register the beat they were moving in before they reached the stairs. She had been told that she was clumsy for most of her life, so the idea of dancing without losing her beat was entirely a possibility; even without taking into account they were heading straight for the stairs. Her hand tightened on the Doctor’s back as they made the first step off the landing.

            He spun around her, dropping to the step below her and lifting her carefully onto the next one. The entire motion was much smoother than she thought it would be, and by the time that the floor levelled out beneath them, the idea of keeping up with the waltz without treading on the Doctor’s feet was looking much more achievable. Unless, of course, he really deserved it, in which case those ugly orange spats would be covered in dusty footprints.

 

            “There.” Peri murmured, relieved at the level ground beneath their feet. “Back on solid ground, now the hard part’s over.”

            “I wouldn’t speak so quickly, Peri.” the Doctor warned, craning his head about as he turned. “I rather fancy the plants thinned towards the stairs. Now we’re in the woods proper. Keep your eyes out for… other dancers.”

            Peri turned her head to look closer at where they were heading, but in a matter of seconds it disappeared behind a flutter of leaves and a swish of plaid. It made her dizzy, and she pressed her eyes closed for a moment. The scents in the room became clearer when her eyes were closed, and she picked out a mixture of flowers she didn’t recognise, a touch of rainwater and ozone and the fresh petrichor that came with them. She tilted her head forward just an inch, and even those were covered by the familiar, sweet and spicy scent of the Doctor. A wave of relief poured over Peri, and the panic she had felt earlier finally felt properly soothed instead of just dulled.

 

            A tendril of ivy uncoiled in their direction, and Peri turned away to let the plant take their place on the floor. An older fern wilted by her feet, and Peri gratefully stepped into it, guessing where the barest patches of forest would appear next. A small tree, perhaps one of the flowering sort they had observed in the conservatory, splintered off branches as it grew to reach and then surpass the Doctor’s height. Peri very nearly caught the edge of her dress on it.

            _Wait._ thought Peri. _What dress?_

            Peri looked down, and although she did seem to be attempting to continue dancing, she didn’t appear to be looking at her feet. As he manoeuvred them around a stand of what appeared to be a kind of three-foot tall hyacinth, it took the Doctor a moment to notice this at all.

            “Peri?” the Doctor asked. She didn’t react at first, then turned her eyes up to his.

            “Yes, Doctor?” she asked calmly.

            "If you see anything unusual, you will let me know, won’t you? Scream or something."

            "What exactly counts as unusual, Doctor?"

            "Hm?" he asked, trying to keep them moving and somehow convey to her that he was in fact paying attention to what she was saying.

            "I mean, there's unusual for... I don't know, a normal person, or unusual for me—well, you."

            "If in doubt, I encourage you to ask. For all I know you might get delirious and think something strange is perfectly normal. Waltzing through a swarm of quick-growing plants, for instance."

            "I think this might be normal for me, I mean, normal since I started travelling with you."

            "What do you mean?"

            "Well, I don't remember changing my clothes, but I'm wearing a big white dress with flowers all over it."

            Peri leaned back slightly to show him and the Doctor accommodated this improvised flourish to their dance as best as he could, dipping her low over his arm, but as far as he could tell, his friend was still wearing a neon yellow leotard and cyan shorts. The leotard had a fairly high boat-neckline, at least high for Peri, but had cut-outs over the shoulders and sternum, as if to remind everyone present that Peri was young, pretty and native to the nineteen eighties. As the Doctor was the only person present and in no danger of forgetting any of those things, that seemed unnecessary, but he’d long since learned that he and Peri were unlikely to see eye-to-eye in their fashion choices. The colour scheme, while promising, was a bit subdued for his taste and the cut of the garment was far from his idea of tasteful and left far too little to the imagination to be provocative, at least in the Doctor’s opinion.

            “And quite well it suits you, I imagine.” the Doctor said dryly.

            “So I guess that means you aren’t seeing it?”

            “No, but if it makes you feel better, I could pretend that I see it and say ‘yuck’.” He drew her back against his chest and kept waltzing towards the exit. Peri sighed in frustration.

            “This is ridiculous.” she murmured, rolling her eyes. “Usually we’ve met _someone_ between landing on a planet and me being forced into a wedding dress.”

            What she was seeing was actually a good deal prettier than it sounded when she described it; which was a pity seeing as it didn't exist. Rather than a dress with a floral pattern, it literally had flowers all over it.

            There was something very Alphonse Mucha about the garment, in that it was a more of a diaphanous sheet trailing around her body than a dress, with actual live flowers blooming across the fabric, wilting, falling away only to be replaced by more of them. She could almost feel their tendrils coiling up around her body, trying to catch in her hair, covering her in a gentle hug and then falling away to be replaced with fresh blossoms. Almost, but not quite. They didn’t feel properly there, more like she expected to feel something there and her mind was filling in the details. It reminded her of when a girl in her high school class ran her fingers down Peri’s skull, explaining all the while that she had just cracked an egg over the other girl’s head. It probably wouldn’t have felt at all like an egg if she hadn’t said anything, but with the idea planted in her head, the tips of her fingers easily turned into cold egg white flowing through her hair. Peri closed her eyes again and tried to focus on the feeling of plants on her skin, but shutting her eyes deadened the sensation almost entirely, and the more attention she paid to it, the less she felt. She found herself wondering if she shifted her attention to something else entirely, the phantom vines would stop. Peri tried her best to ignore the brush of phantom plants growing up her legs and carry on dancing. Her attention shifted to her dance partner, who was still murmuring something to himself. It was possible that the Doctor had been talking to Peri the entire time, but she had tuned him out a bit when she noticed vines crawling up her legs.

 

            Peri screwed her eyes shut for a moment. There was no need to start deluding herself into thinking things were any worse than they already were. They were already waltzing through a forest that was moving almost as fast as they were, caught in a patch of disordered time, and trapped in a decaying house. She didn’t need to make things out to be worse than they actually were. She took her hand off the Doctor’s arm and brushed it past her face idly. She repeated the action, faster, but didn’t seem to register what she was doing.

            “…of course, even that sort of time distortion wouldn’t account for… Peri?” he asked, concerned but afraid to stop dancing. She shook her head and tore at the air in front of her face, clearly becoming frustrated.

            “Peri, what’s wrong?” he asked, slowing down. He winced and then sped up again. “I would dearly love to stop and help you, but you know why I can’t do that. We have to keep moving.”

            “I know, that’s why I’m trying to get this out of my face. It fell down and I can’t see anymore.” she fretted, tearing her hands away from the Doctor to pull the imaginary object away from her face. Her hands opened and closed in attempts to grip the non-existent item. He pressed her to his chest to keep her moving.

            “Close your eyes, Peri.” he murmured. “There’s nothing in your face. It’s simply another vision.”

            The Doctor raised his head and manoeuvred them another few steps along. Despite how fast they had to move, progress was slow. The Doctor frowned, cursing the whole situation internally. He would have cursed it externally as well if it hadn’t been for Peri, so he satisfied himself with a few tutting noises at the back of his throat. Even still, he wasn’t entirely sure that at any moment a vine might caught his toe and all of the expletives he’d been holding behind his teeth would flow out of his mouth in a single continuous stream.

 

            Peri _did_ close her eyes, but only for a moment, to see if it would clear the haze. It didn’t, but after a few blinks she was more used to it. It looked a little as if the whole room was clouded, but she could still see the Doctor in front of her and the plants around her. She glanced down to confirm that the last vision hadn’t ended, and sure enough the dress remained on her body. What’s more, another layer of illusion appeared to have joined the dress and the mist. She sighed in exasperation.

 

            “Doctor, my feet aren’t reaching the ground.” Peri wearily commented.

            “Am I holding you too high?” he asked, adjusting his grip.

            “No, I mean my feet aren’t reaching the ground.” she replied sharply. “I can feel something hard beneath my feet when I put them down but they aren’t touching the floorboards.”

            “Oh, that.” he replied dismissively. “It’s a minor spatial anomaly. Pay it no heed. You probably would have noticed a good deal more of them if you were looking for them. Why, even the plants…”

            The Doctor paused in his speech to swing her around a vine that suddenly became to heavy to remain on the ceiling and crashed to the ground.

            “...are probably appearing to move differently than they actually are. Everything falls in a pattern, Peri, but it isn’t at all natural for all the patterns of nature to match up like this. I believe that it’s simply some sort of spatial displacement… if you are seeing things in places other than they are, it might account for much of what you’ve been seeing. Anything at all can turn into errant nonsense when removed from context.”

            “Wait, so the fact my feet aren’t touching the ground is a good sign?” Peri asked sceptically. “What you’re saying is that it looks like nothing is moving in sync with that it’s supposed to be because it’s trying to move in sync with each other.”

            “Quite.” the Doctor frowned. “Someone has made a right mess of time here, it will really be all we can do to get out of it unscathed. I’m not sure what the timelords expected me to do about it.”

            “But are my feet touching the floor or not?” Peri asked insistently.

            “Well, they are at the _moment_ , but when you asked that question, they did not appear to be. Nor were mine, come to that. It was really quite distracting.”

            “Why didn’t you just say that?” Peri demanded.

            “I thought you might panic if you knew I couldn’t see the floor.” he answered simply. “You’re not entirely at your best at the moment, it’s been a very trying day for both of us.”

            “If we survive this, I just might kill you.” Peri growled, flashing daggers at the Doctor.

 

            Peri tried her best to ignore the phantom plants growing up her legs and carry on dancing.

            “Well, this fog hallucination is new, at least.”

            “Yes, Peri, about your visions…” the Doctor murmured, “I’ve been working on a new theory which I think might cover all of the instances. In fact, I do believe that the fact I was able to observe your feet failing to meet the ground all but settles the matter.”

            “Then I’m all ears.”

            “Ouch!” the Doctor exclaimed. He took a moment to glower down at his friend. “Not all at, Peri, at the moment it would be more accurate to say you’re all feet! Only you could be dancing two inches from the ground and _still_ tread on my feet! Do be more careful!”

            “Sorry!” Peri snarled, not sounding particularly sorry at all. “There was a vine on my leg and I was trying to pull away from it long enough to figure out if it really was there.”

            “And? Was it?”

            “No, it wasn’t on my leg. It was in my head.”

            “But did you feel it? Have the hallucinations have become tactile?” the Doctor asked with concern. Peri shook her head.

            “I don’t think so. I think it was just suggestion, like when people start talking about spiders crawling up your legs or egg dripping down your head? It felt a lot like that. As soon as I stopped trying to ignore it and really figure out where it was coming from, it went away.”

            “That’s something, I suppose.” the Doctor frowned. “If you’re sure that you’re only seeing these visions and not feeling or hearing anything unusual?”  
            “No. I haven’t heard anything—anything other than you rambling on, I mean—since I heard the wind chime. I still think it’s weird that the wind chime had an actual _tune_ , shouldn’t it have been more random?”

            “Not if your mind is assigning meaning to random stimuli, which is largely what I’m basing the latest theory on. But tell me about your leg.”

            “I’d really like to hear this theory.”

            “And so you shall. Once you grant me this new information, of course.” the Doctor answered with the kind of assurance that made Peri want to scream. “It will do neither of us any good if I talk your ear off with a theory I will abandon the moment I have new information.”

            “Which is different from our normal conversations, how exactly?” Peri asked pointedly. “I think something just brushed against my leg and my mind tried to work it into what I was seeing. I can’t feel it any more. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind feeling it, it’s a little freaky to be seeing vines crawl up your legs and not feel them.”

            “I do hope you’re sure about that as it would fit rather neatly into my current theory. Had you felt something tactile, I fear I would have had to entirely rework my diagnosis.”

            “Diagnosis?” Peri repeated. “That new theory you were talking about?”

            “Indeed it is.” the Doctor nodded. “Earlier, you described one of your visions as ghosts and I corrected you.”

            “I was just saying that’s what it looked like, I didn’t think that ghosts were an actual thing…” Peri trailed off, looking down at her body. Her eyes grew as if she were making a discovery, but the Doctor was too concerned with his own theories to notice she was working on her own.

            “I’m afraid that my latest theory demands that I retract that.” the Doctor sighed.

            “Doctor, I think I’ve seen this dress before-” Peri began, paying almost as little attention to what he was saying as he was in return.

            “I’d going to take it as writ that the spore you inhaled caused your currently dilemma, to wit: You are observing eerie, displaced images and noises. It seems that, quite by accident, you put your finger directly on the problem. This house is full of ghosts, and _that_ is what you’ve been seeing.” said the Doctor decisively. That broke Peri out of her reverie.

            “When you say ghosts…”

            “Oh, do keep up, Peri! I’ve already told you once today; a ghost is an event separated from its timestream.”

            “So what you’re saying is that I’m not hallucinating, I’m seeing ghosts?” Peri asked sceptically.

            “Yes Peri, that is it precisely.” the Doctor nodded. She sighed wearily.

            “ _Great._ ” she muttered with a grimace.

 

The Doctor frowned thoughtfully.

            "…although, if the spore is making you more susceptible to seeing echoes in time, that would explain why the old loon was keeping it around."

            "Old loon?" asked Peri, suddenly wishing she’d been paying a little more attention. "No, I haven’t seen any loons yet. Practically everything else, though."

            "You wouldn't have done, Peri. Remember, you aren't hallucinating." he shook his head. "Everything you are seeing _has_ been here, but it isn't now. Or it isn't yet. Poor dear, we must get you out of here before you lose your mind entirely!"

            "Okay, I get the theory, but… if all these things existed and I’m seeing echoes of them in time, why was the furniture flying around the front room like that? And this dress!" she tugged at the non-existent fabric. “Even if there was a dress like this before, why am I seeing it on me?”

            "It all rather suggests that you've already begun to lose control of your senses, I know." he said wearily.

            “Doctor, I lost control of my senses almost as soon as we got in here.” Peri replied glibly. “At this point, it’s my sanity I’m worried about.”

 

            As the words left her mouth, an unpleasant thought crossed her mind. Usually, if she was worrying about one of their mental states, it was the Doctor’s. His episodes had steadily become less violent and less frequent, but she couldn’t help but worry. The last time he’d really lost track of himself, all he had done was start singing to himself in a library. It wasn’t even a public library, and it had been a month previous. Of course, the owner of the library did think it was in rather poor taste that he starting singing an aria while investigating a murder, particularly given that he was three feet from her nephew’s warm corpse. When he realised what he was doing, the Doctor get flustered and contritely explained that he’d lost track of where he was.

Sometimes he would find himself lost in the corridors, or stop what he was doing and look confused as to what he was doing there. Far too many dinners had been burnt because the Doctor had stopped to think and forgotten to start again. But that’s what Peri was for, or so he’d led her to believe. Perhaps he didn’t really _need_ her to keep himself together, but he had often given her the impression that he did.

 _No, not often_.thought Peri. _Not if you count glances over his shoulder, keeping his hand on my arm, and speeches like the one he just gave in the woods. Not often. Constantly._

Peri didn’t care for this train of thought, she couldn’t help but feel in this situation she should really be more worried about how she was going to get out of this with her sanity intact and what life would be like if she failed. If she just kept seeing more and more of these things, so much that she was in a constant fear of the next little anachronistic item that her mind would be insisting was attacking her, what would her life become? The Doctor would remain with her, there wasn’t any room for doubt in her mind that he would insist on taking care of her personally. But if she became a nervous wreck and the Doctor turned all of his attentions to taking care of her, who would take care of him?

 

These thoughts passed through Peri’s mind in an instant, and whether they showed on her face or the Doctor simply knew the difference between Peri joking about something and Peri pretending to joke about something he seemed to get the vague idea of what she was thinking.

            The Doctor moved her hand from her back and brushed a bit of hair from her face. He gazed down at her, speaking softly.

            “You aren’t losing your mind, Peri. You mind is doing everything in its power to keep you sane.” There was something in his voice Peri couldn’t put her finger on, something that was neither quite pity nor concern.

 

            “Doctor, if this is making me see time, shouldn’t it be enhancing what you can see, not limiting it?” she asked. The Doctor shook his head.

            "It wouldn't work the same on a timelord. We already can sense threads of time. I can tell if an event is avoidable or fixed in time as easily as you can tell if a flower is blue."

            "Does that mean you know how we're going to get out of here?" she asked. The Doctor frowned thoughtfully, pausing in the dance.

            "Peri?"

            "Yes?"

            "Do you see that blossom over there?" he asked, indicating a nearby flower shaped vaguely like a hibiscus.

            "Mm-hm."

            "What colour is it?" he asked.

            "...sort of... periwinkley lavender?"

            "Would you say it was blue?"

            "It's _sort of_ blue, I guess."

            "But is it blue? Properly blue? Can you definitively tell me that that flower is in fact, _blue?_ That the flower isn't pink? _"_

            "It's not pink _or_ blue." said Peri. "It's purple. If you want to get specific, it's kind of mauve."

            "But mauve isn't blue, it's just _sort of_ blue." said the Doctor. "And at the moment, the situation is most decidedly mauve.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I very much hope that the next chapter will be the last one, but since this chapter was supposed to be the last one I cannot make any promises.


	7. The Trees Keep the Tempo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Peri theorise what's been happening. They then fall in a hole.

The pair spun over a patch of low-lying flowers that would have reminded Peri of edelweiss if they hadn’t smelt quite so strongly of honeydew. The scent grew stronger with every flower they crushed underfoot.

 

The detached part of Peri that was viewing this whole situation with bemusement had to admit there was something very charming about the scene. Now that she had the tempo, Peri was keeping up the waltz without a problem. They had danced before, admittedly in completely different circumstances, and the Doctor had loudly expressed that he spent the entire experience in constant fear for his feet.

That wasn’t an issue here, though. It was hard to lose the beat when the entire environment was shifting slightly to meet it. The distant chime echoed in her ears, tinkling like a wind-up toy as flowers fanned out their petals like jewellery box ballerinas, spinning gracefully in place. And the Doctor led beautifully, for all of his brashness and temper he was a graceful and surprisingly cultured man.

_If there’s an antiquated skill with no bearing on saving universes, the Doctor’s probably mastered it._ Peri thought with a wicked little smile.

And there she danced in the middle of it all, the dress she knew perfectly well didn’t actually exist fanning out as she turned, that light gauzy fabric spreading through the air around her. If it were real, it probably would have caught on the branches, but that wasn’t the case. It filled the air, almost in slow-motion, as more flowering vines she couldn’t actually feel but kept thinking she ought to be able to grew up the fabric’s length and wove themselves into her hair.

If she hadn’t been in the middle of it and trying to get out of it without losing her mind, it probably would have been quite pretty indeed.

 

            All at once, the vision faded and Peri clung closer to her friend in surprise. It took her just a moment to assess that she was in fact returned to what she had dressed in that morning; and that if her clothes _had_ disappeared completely, perhaps hiding inside the Doctor's coat was not the best plan.

            “Are you quite alright, Peri?” the Doctor asked, sounding slightly worried.

            “Fine.” she said quickly. “I thought my clothes—you know what? Nevermind. Everything’s back to normal. Except for the dancing through fast growing plants, I mean.”

            “Oh, of course not that.” the Doctor nodded. He turned his attention back to leading. “But your hallucinations have faded?”

“For the moment. Unless I’m just hallucinating that we’re doing this, which wouldn’t actually surprise me. As long as we’re on the subject, is this _really_ the best way to do this?” Peri asked, eying the Doctor critically.

“I do wish you’d stop asking me that. I didn’t simply awake this morning and think, ‘this seems like a lovely to day to take Peri dancing among unnaturally accelerated flora, if only I could think of some way to arrange it!’ ” the Doctor huffed. He frowned.

“And furthermore, if we were attempting to move through this forest in any other fashion, it would still have to be in this halting, twirling pattern, but all the time remaining on this particular regular beat, so as a matter of fact, yes! This _is_ the best way to cross the forest.”

“Oh, so this is the less awkward version?” Peri scoffed.

“Yes, Peri!” the Doctor snapped, “There may be many different ways to approach this situation, but I prefer a graceful if unconventional approach to awkward floundering!”

The Doctor blinked suddenly and looked directly at Peri for just a moment.

            “ ‘Awkward floundering…’ Peri, I believe I’ve just remembered which Dr. Reimer this is.” the Doctor exclaimed. “I ought to have realised when you said you heard the name as well. I never ought to have disregarded this, your observations are invaluable to my investigations. I’ve often said that you often play quite the Watson to my Holmes: a mind less keen, but a second mind nevertheless.”

            “I think _I_ said it more recently…” Peri muttered. “So we met him?”

            "No. You must remember, Peri—he was one of the scientists experimenting with time travel on that space station. When we met my other self?"

            "But wasn't he killed?" Peri asked. "Or _eaten_ , or something?"

            "No, no, no. Your mind is a bit addled, Peri. It must be the spore. We never met Dr. Reimer ourselves, he wasn't on the space station and therefore escaped the fate of most of the inhabitants. Dip." He braced Peri's back and lowered her under an outhanging branch. Straightening her back up, the Doctor continued.

            "No, as best as I can gather from the partially destroyed records, someone was experimenting with time travel. Someone named Dr. Reimer, and you and I have already crossed paths with the research he and Dr. Kartz were doing in that field. _She_ was doing..? Neither of me actually met with either of them... It’s immaterial in any case. The problem they came across was that none of the Kartz-Reimer time capsules could work without a timelord present, and as they were not interested in making time machines that could only be used by a species that already had functioning, and I daresay more elegantly designed time travel, the damn things were useless.” He huffed loudly.

            “…and now we’ve breathed pollen that changes how we perceive time.” Peri added uneasily. “That makes it sound a lot like someone was trying to make humans that could actually _use_ the time machines.”

            “I can’t say I approve, or that the Timelords would; but that’s largely because they’re hypocrites.” the Doctor scoffed. “Timelords ourselves were bred from Gallifreyans to create a species capable of sustained time travel. Our genetics were toyed with to an appalling level; we sense time in a way no other species can, we can rebuild our bodies in times of great injury, but we’re hardly recognisable from the people we were forcibly evolved from. We can’t even breed amongst ourselves without mechanical assistance and the mules are utter messes.”

            Peri winced.

            “That doesn’t sound entirely different from what was attempted here, but on a far lesser scale. It’s entirely possible to breed a plant extract that would affect a human’s perception of time-” the Doctor continued.

            “Well, that’s what the guys in my dorm said…”

            “But to attempt to force a species to develop a sense its brain wasn’t designed to comprehend, it’s—it’s like putting a lamp in an unwired room!”

            “But the room was wired, wasn’t it?” asked Peri.

            “Sorry?” the Doctor asked.

            “The drawing room, or whatever it was. The room off the study with that creepy painting, remember? I thought you were referencing that.” explained Peri, gazing up at the Doctor with wide eyes. “The lamp was wired into the wall, but the rest of the house wasn’t wired.”

            “Yes, of course.” the Doctor nodded. “That probably has something to do with each room being a different time, some of the rooms could have reverted to a time before they were wired and missing part of the system, the entire network would fail. I’m still more concerned with your brain trying to understand a dimension it normally can’t perceive.”

            “So am I or am I not turning into a human time lord, er, lady?”

            “I should hope not, Peri. As you know, the Timelords consider themselves the constabulary of time travel, making up their own laws about who should use it and how, they naturally look in on whenever another species is experimenting in time travel.”

            “Why do I get the feeling this story is going to end badly for me?”

            “Because time travel is a messy business when you don’t know what you’re doing, and with the exception of Timelords, all attempts to create a subspecies capable of connecting symbiotically to a time machine has resulted in madness, hallucinations, sensory overload, seizures, and at best, death.”

            “Death?”

            “Yes, Peri.” the Doctor replied sadly. “I suspect Dr. Reimer paid the price for his academic curiosity. If he had made it out of this house alive, surely he would have put some defences around it to prevent innocent explorers such as us from becoming trapped or at least attempted to cover his tracks.”

           

            “And since you’re full of answers now, I suppose you can explain the fact each room is in a different patch of time than the others?”

            “Well, if _I_ were to attempt it…” the Doctor considered thoughtfully. “Well, it wouldn’t be at all safe, but considering the general wisdom of the experiments being carried out here… It could be done with reality bubbles. Compared to placing the Tardis interior in another dimension, this is a science fair project. My _pockets_ are a more delicate piece of spatial folding than this house.” He said the last sentence as if it were the vilest insult. Peri suspected it lost something translated from Gallifreyian.

            “I have encountered a house scattered through time once, when I was working with UNIT. Dreadful business. A country house in England—or was it Wales? It was in Budapest briefly due to all it’s hopping about—Fernhill Manor, or something like that. Manors end up with ridiculous names like that, two pleasant things found in the area smashed together as if that differentiates it from any other banally-named home in the cosmos. Even this house probably has a name along those lines.”

            “I was thinking of just calling it ‘hell’, but if you find out what it’s supposed to be called I’ll use that.” Peri commented sarcastically.

            “I shouldn’t call it that if I were you, Peri. Your planet’s mythos may have described an unpleasant enough situation, but I would prefer to compare this situation to an escapable one. In any case, if memory serves from what little time I spent with Dante, this is more of the Asphodel Meadows. It would account for the ghosts you were seeing if the guiltless damned filled this house. Perhaps Purgatory Grove?” the Doctor suggested. “Back to my original point, that same house found itself in several places in Earth’s history all at once. Quite unusual for an English Country house, I thought.”

            “Oh yeah, quite.” Peri agreed mildly.

            “People have been broken across time before—well, a person. I saw it once, once being at several different points of history for me but only one for him. A fellow called Scarlioni. Well, at one point called Scarlioni, at any rate. But a location? I’m not sure if that could be the answer, that was a person scattered in time, this is a house whose rooms are broken into different hours.”

            “Is that possible?” asked Peri.

            “I’m not sure if it’s possible, but whether or not it’s possible hardly matters as it does seem to be happening.” replied the Doctor. “But—no, this doesn’t make any sense! The energy it would take to create these temporal zones would be phenomenal, and the very instability itself has wiped out the power source! It’s a paradox, Peri, and it _should not be!_ ”

 

            “Okay, Doctor.” Peri nodded. “I think I’ve only got one more question.”

            “Only one? You disappoint me, I was only just starting to get a wind behind me in theorising out loud.”

            “Yeah, you really started to sound like you knew what you were talking about.” Peri scoffed.

            “Very well, my dear, what is your final question?”

            “Are you sure this really the best way to move through the forest?” Peri asked. “You can only see where we’re going half the time and I’m getting dizzy. I think you just wanted to dance with me.”

            “Oh do shut up.” the Doctor scolded. “I’ve already told you as much. I shan’t answer any frivolous questions; I _am_ trying to explain what’s happening, which is rather difficult when you don’t quite know yourself.”

            The pair doubled back on the path they’d been working on, as a tree had taken root where they had intended to dance.

            “Now Peri, I have a question of my own.” said the Doctor. He fixed his gaze on Peri’s.

            "Do you not find it in the least bit worrying that a botanist and a timelord found a place where someone was experimenting with plants and time travel?" he asked. "It's rather too convenient, I'd go so far as to say that it smacks rather of one of those coincidences that turns out not to be coincidental at all."

            “What do you mean?”

            “Peri, you’ve heard me speak of my people, in such glowing terms that could only be afforded a man with _deep_ _affection_ _and nostalgia_?” he hissed the last few words as if he would have much preferred to use some choice expletives but couldn’t think of any strong enough. He flashed a very angry look towards the ceiling.

            “You think that the timelords have something to do with this?” Peri asked. “That they nudged us onto this planet and just hoped you’d find the trouble and deal with yourself, like sicing a cat on a mouse?”

            “Peri, one doesn’t sic cats on mice.” the Doctor corrected, wrinkling his nose. “One may command a dog to chase game, but with a cat you simply nudge it into the same room as the mouse and hope it deals with the problem by it’s own volition.”

            “I know.” said Peri. “That’s why I used the comparison.” The Doctor frowned in irritation.

            “I accept your point… yes, I think that’s _precisely_ what they’ve been doing.” he answered darkly. Peri suspected from the way his hand tightened on her waist as he spoke that if he had the option of skulking off to his room and brooding for a few hours, he would have leapt at it.

            “Doctor, how did they know we were going to land on this planet?” Peri asked. “And this close to the house? I know that you’ve had some trouble steering the Tardis before, but I thought this time we landed _somewhere_ around where you we aiming at.” The Doctor refused to meet her gaze.

            “I should have known…” she groaned. “You didn’t act surprised, if we landed where we were aiming at you would have acted surprised…”

            “That’s not at all fair!” the Doctor exclaimed. You make it sound as if I never land where I intended to!”

            “Don’t you?” Peri retorted. The Doctor suddenly needed to focus all of his attention on manoeuvring them under a branch, clearly losing track of the conversation while he was doing it. He made a point of not looking at Peri as he did so. Peri almost smiled.

            “Well, if the Timelords got us here, I hope that they can fix whatever’s going on in my head.”

            “I very much doubt it. Oh, they might have the technology but they wouldn’t have sent me if they dared sully their lily-white hands with this mess. Offering you medical aid would be far too much like admitting that they had something to do with you being here; and they would surely have never sent me here if their wasn’t some culpability they wished to preserve. I suppose they expect me to destroy this anomaly or something of that nature. If they saw a less violent solution I expect they would have enacted it through proper channels. Rassilon knows how they love their paperwork.”

            He cast his eyes to the ceiling again.

“I shan’t, you know!” he called. “I shan’t!”

 

Peri stared blankly into the middle distance, considering the possibility that the timelords had been watching them the entire time. It wasn’t the being lead into danger that bothered her quite as much, she was used to being led into danger by a timelord. But something about the fact that she had been observed, _watched_ while she was floundering around in terror was humiliating. The bile rose in her throat at the thought of some bored Gallifreyian idly reviewing their day, watching them curl up together in the drawing room. True, they hadn’t been as affectionate as they might have been in a more comfortable situation, but she had thought they were in private. A part of Peri’s mind pointed out that knowing that the Timelords were watching when they were being comparatively discreet hardly meant that they were _not_ tuning into other, much more personal situations and concluded that the Timelords were a bunch of voyeurs.

No, she told herself, focusing on that was stupid. Especially when there was so much about this to be offended by. It was entirely appropriate to be angry about the danger, for one. It was true that the doctor led them into dangerous situations on a regular basis, but that was _one_ timelord, who she trusted and had given permission to lead her into danger. Which was probably a terrible choice in itself, but it was a terrible choice had knowingly made.

 

“And anyway, I’d just as well that they didn’t.” the Doctor frowned. “I haven’t had the best of luck introducing my human companions to members of my race.”

“You can say that again.” Peri huffed. “I remember the Master.”

“Peri, as much as it pains me to say it, the Master is not the greatest threat the timelords have offered to my companions. The Master just threatens my companions, kills their relatives, and tries to use them to make me surrender to him. And once, he kidnapped one of them and forced him to engineer a pocket dimension to trap me in, but that was a very special case. He never has meddled in their timelines, altered their memories, or for that matter, married any of them. And I’ve encountered him far more often than any other Timelord, much less the high council. It seems to me that every time I visit Gallifrey, I leave with fewer companions than I had before I left. I’d just as rather _none_ of them involve themselves in my business.” the Doctor frowned. “Which principally involves your safety at this particular moment. I don’t much care for him but he is the least of our concerns at the moment.”

“Fine, Doctor. I’ll just add ‘Timelords’ to the list of things I should be worrying about.”

“Peri, you’ve only encountered three timelords and they’ve all personally endangered your life at least once. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if you were less than favourably disposed towards them.”

“Doctor, that’s not fair.” said Peri evenly. “One of them didn’t actively try to kill me.”

“Peri, do not defend my actions.” the Doctor shook his head. “I endanger you on a daily basis. I’m endangering you right now.”

“I wasn’t going to argue about that.” replied Peri, stepping over a writhing root. “I just meant I don’t think the Rani _cared_ if I died or not.”

“Ah.” He pressed his lips together awkwardly, “Yes, her callous indifference has changed little since our school days.” The last comment came out as if was spitting out something bitter. He seemed lost in reverie for a moment, gazing into the distance as he danced. They were more than halfway across the floor now. Peri kept thinking of suggesting that they stop dancing and make a break for it, but given how long it had taken them to hit the right rhythm, she was a little afraid of stopping. Particularly given her hallucinations. Or visions from other patches of time. Or whatever they were. She blinked and looked around.

 

            "Doctor." Peri said anxiously, but clearly trying to remain calm.

            "What is it? What are you seeing?"

            "I don't _think_ I'm seeing anything." she answered. "That's what worries me. The hallucinations haven't had pauses this long since they started."

            "That's good, isn't it?" he asked.

            "Not if I _am_ hallucinating and can't tell what part of this isn't real." She tightened her grip on the Doctor's jacket. "I didn't let go of you at any point, did I?"

            "Not that I remember. In any case, I certainly didn't let go of you."

            "But Doctor," Peri's voice rose in timbre, "If I _did_ let go of you, but thought that I kept hold of you because I was hallucinating that you were there, wouldn't the hallucination say that it didn't let go of me?"

            "Yes, I suppose it would." the Doctor agreed. "That is, if your mind was filling in the most natural thing for me to say at the moment. Or, if it weren't a hallucination but someone trying to convince you that they were me. Or-"

            "Stop it!" Peri shrieked. "Stop! How is scaring me going to make things any better?"

            "I’m not trying to frighten you, I’m trying to figure out how to assure you this isn’t an hallucination." he said seriously. “But I’m not sure what the hallucinations have in common. Have any of them been tactile yet?” The hand that was clasped in his ran it's fingers over his palm, and the Doctor clutched it comfortingly.

            “Just the vines on my legs,” said Peri, sounding slightly relieved, “But whenever they interact with anything else, they’re out of sync. It’s like… they’re trying to hit the same beats, even if that means walking over a broken piece of floor, or speeding up suddenly and then slowing down while the sound stays the same….”

            The Doctor slid his hand down Peri’s wrist, then back up into her clasp. She watched the motion carefully, threading his fingers into his and squeezing his hand tightly when it was returned to her grasp, as if reluctant to let go of it again.

            “Am I in sync?” the Doctor asked. Peri nodded vehemently.

            "There." he said proudly. "I must be real."

            “So.” she gave a nervous, hopeful laugh. “I guess that means I’m not hallucinating right now.” The Doctor beamed down at his companion.

            “No, my dear, I don’t believe you are.” he replied warmly.

            At this point, both of them tumbled through the rotted-out place in the floorboards that appeared perfectly solid to Peri.

 

 

 

            The Doctor shook his head, trying to free himself from this feeling of disorientation. His hand groped out, trying to establish where he was and where his companion had landed. He found only broken wood and more leaves.

            “Peri?” he asked, sitting up. He felt a slight confusion, like a schoolchild who laid their head on a desk for a moment suddenly realising that the teacher was awaiting the answer to an unheard question. He wasn’t sure how long he had been lying on the damp ground, it might have been a few seconds, or it could have been an hour. An unpleasant thought ran through the Doctor’s mind: with his sense of time in the state that it was, he could have been lying on that ground for several days and awoken unaware that any time had passed at all. As he gained his bearings, the Doctor became aware of the fact that he was in a basement of some sort.

            It was nearly pitch black, nearly all of the light falling from the hole he can only assume he’d tumbled through. It slanted in narrow beams through the dusty air, creating a murky feeling like looking up at the surface from underwater. He could make out the shapes of the room around him, but nearly no details. The ground beneath his feet was packed dirt, but except for directly under the hole, there were almost no plants growing in it. And even then, it was only a few weak heads of fern and a discoloured blanket of moss.

            The Doctor knew fully well that cellars were always cold, hence why they made such good storage, but in the dim and the silence he couldn’t help but think of this as less a cellar and more a tomb. No, surely those distant rows of black pits in what he hoped was a wall were the struts of a wine rack, not a catacomb. The blackness stretched out around him; with north, south, east and west stretching out with no discernable end to any of them.

            And, more distressingly, no sign of Peri.

            The Doctor looked around as frantically as he could manage without tripping over the broken wood.

            “Peri?” he called, turning in place so quickly a cloud of dust rose from the edge of his coat.

            “Peri? Peri, this is no time to suddenly fall silent. Say something if you can hear me!” The Doctor paused hopefully, but after the faintest echo returned to him from somewhere in the cavernous basement, there was nothing. He picked a direction at random and started to walk towards it, raising his voice.

            “Peri, call out to me or I’ll start reciting ‘The Sleeper’ again! You’ve already let me know how you feel about Poe!” No answer came, and so, partially to calm his nerves but mostly to give Peri a frame of direction if she heard his voice, the Doctor began to speak.

 

“ _I pray to God that she may lie; For ever with unopened eye, while the pale sheeted ghosts go by!”_

            He passed a patch of plants, but unlike the others they had found in this house, these were quite dead. A thick, woody vine like grapewood had descended from the first level. He stepped closer, noting that it wasn’t just grapewood. There had been morning glory or something similar growing with it, although it was impossible to say what the smaller vine was now that it was dead. Most of the smaller vine had rotted away entirely, and the only sign that an annual had grown with the perennial was the gaps in the wood where another vine belonged, each vine shaping the other’s growth as the two plants entwined themselves. The Doctor was uncomfortably reminded of his relationship with Peri and moved past the plants, electing to loudly recite poetry and not think about how the grape’s twisted gaps left by a long-dead vine reminded him of the only possible face of a timelord supported by a human.

_“My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep as it is lasting, so be deep!”_

 

            Perhaps, he thought, picking his way through the blackness, Peri was right to object to that poem in this setting. He ran his tongue over his lips and thought about how little the narrator’s distress over his dead lover would help either Peri’s or his state of mind at the moment. He didn’t understand how he could have lost track of her, he was holding onto her when they fell through the floor. Even if she had stayed conscious when he lost whatever time he did, laying on the moss under the hole in the floor, she should have stayed with him. She had enough sense not to wander off, didn’t see? Well, perhaps not normally, but in this state she surely must. Why would she explore on her own when she couldn’t trust her own senses? Even if she thought she saw the way out, she ought to have stayed with him. Unless some vision called to her when he was not conscious to dispute it.

            The Doctor’s mind readily supplied the image of Peri lying beside him on the moss, tenderly checking him over for any injuries, making a great fuss over the fallen hero as he had no doubt she would. Then in the pantomime of his head, her mind robbed her of the ability to see the Doctor, because he wasn’t there in the period of time she could see, and then seeing the flash of his brilliantly coloured coat—a coat which she complimented in a white on black placard flashed to the screen, unlikely of course but this _was_ his fantasy—rising to her feet and following this will-o-the-wisp off to her doom. Admittedly, in his mind the whole thing took on the look of a early film melodrama, the vision a sinister version of himself luring away his companion when he needed her the most.

 

            _“…soft may the worms about her creep…”_ the Doctor continued, trying to ignore the way his boots sank up the spats in the in the dirt. The ground was getting damper the further he went in this direction. It occurred to him that in this material Peri would have left a distinct trail, and as best he could see in the dim light the only footprints in the dirt were his own.

            In fact, as he followed the trail back to the one spot of light he landed in, it appeared that she never hit the ground at all. Very slowly, the Doctor turned his head upward and searched the rotting beams of the floor above him.

 

            Those harmless, powder pale spider-like creatures skittered across the ceiling, spreading their webbing into thick white flying buttresses connecting the walls to the ceiling. A few, sickly yellowish vines tried to gain purchase in the webs, finding the climb difficult not because the web could not support them but rather because there wasn’t enough light to inspire the growth. They grew with the same speed as the room above, but there were so few of them that much of the violence of the forest was lost, just the unease of seeing a plant grow fast enough to watch.

            And there, in the centre of the web, was his companion, covered in thick white sheets like tulle.

            “Peri!” the Doctor ejaculated.

 

            He ran towards her in quick bounds, his coat flaring behind him. He reached the wall where she was hanging like a picture in a frame. A vine had caught around her legs and was weaving between them, binding them together and appearing to grow much more steadily now that it had something firmer to latch onto than the web.

            The Doctor reached up to her; to touch her, feel her pulse, to find out why she said nothing when he called out to her. His hand touched hers, and her fingers twitched against their bindings but couldn’t quite reach his.

            “…Doctor…” Peri said softly. Her breathing came shallowly, and now he could see that the vines which pinioned her in place were cutting across her chest, probably restricting her breath.

            “…I called…” she murmured softly. “…I called… so long… you… I thought… didn’t move…” she attempted to take a deeper breath and the vines cut noticeably into her body.

            “Hold on. Don’t panic, if you can help it. It would be so much better if only one of us were panicking.” the Doctor said quickly, pulling at the webbing with his fingers. The arachnoids fluttered away from him as if cross at his actions and started building more webs around the furthest part of their discovery. The plants were not eager to release their hold on Peri either, for while the Doctor might have disturbed flying spiders the plants weren’t able to take any notice of him and continued to grow as if nothing had changed. The Doctor pulled his left foot away from the ground, breaking a small vine that was already working its way around his ankle. He would have work quickly to avoid sharing Peri’s fate.

            “My penknife.” the Doctor murmured, dropping his hands from the webbing. He patted his pockets. “I had it just a moment ago, didn’t you comment on it when we were in the room with all of the chairs?”

            His eyes flashed up to Peri’s face, checking for some sign of recognition. A single vine curled around Peri’s cheek, like a green vein spreading under her skin. As she opened her mouth to scream, it crept into her open lips and set a single bud, which unfurled into a round, mauve flower.

            The Doctor raised his hand and pulled the flower away and reached into his pocket for the penknife. Now that he wasn’t thinking about it, it came to his hand readily and soon was hacking at the thick vines that held Peri in place. Most of them were thick and woody like the dead grape vine he saw, winding through themselves and around her body like a poorly-woven basket. He could cut them faster than they grew, but there were so many of them, all moving and trying to send out new feelers from the stems he had cut. He glanced back up to Peri’s face, only to discover more of the flowers were blooming around her head. As he watched, more of the web descended over Peri’s face. Her breaths were coming too shallow to ruffle the thin material. He quickened his work.

 

            At last, enough of the vines were cut that the rest were unable to cling so tightly to the wall. With a series of small snaps, more vines fell away and Peri took a large, deep breath, her chest swelling considerably. Shorter, relieved breaths followed, soon joined by her voice at a normal volume, if considerably out of breath.

            “…I… I tried to call for you…” she panted, “...at first I thought you were dead… I waited for so long…”

            Peri expelled a syllable of weary laughter.

            “But I guess anything seems like forever when you can’t move and all you can see is the body of someone you love and you can’t tell if they’re dead or not…”

            “I almost have you. Now, don’t struggle.”

            “…you stood up… you called for me but you couldn’t see me… I couldn’t breathe, so when I called back, it was so quiet…” Peri’s breath had come back now, but as she explained what happened the strain of everything she’d been through started to break though, and it sounded like she might start crying.

            “Before you stood up, when I thought you might be… the visions started again, angry people pacing around you, through you, and I couldn’t move, there were things crawling up me but I couldn’t turn my head too look at them, and you were… everything else I could deal with, but-”

            “Shh.” the Doctor soothed, reaching up as far as he could with his free hand to cup Peri’s cheek. “I almost have you out of here. I just need to cut the right vines to keep you from damaging anything when you fall free.”

            “Just be careful with that, okay?” she requested nervously.

            “It’s only a penknife, Peri.”

            “I’m just saying that I don’t think you would be carrying it around in your—er, your beige jacket.”

            “Well, I had fewer quills to sharpen then.” he responded irritably. “Now don’t struggle, I can’t possibly hurt you unless you struggle.”

            The last vine came free and Peri tumbled into his arms. At first, she threw her arms around his neck for the sake of stability, but once she was quite decidedly wrapped in his arms rather than in vines, neither of them saw any particular reason to let go for the moment. Peri was a little surprised when she noticed that he had dropped the penknife to stroke her back, but considering that alternatives included stroking her back with the knife still in his hand and not being comforted at all, she wasn’t about to complain. Rather, she buried her face firmly in his chest and gripped the back of his coat with no plans to let go in the near future.

            The Doctor bent his head into the tangled mess of vines and cobwebs and kissed Peri’s cheek.

            “You are quite easily the most insufferable woman I’ve ever had to pleasure to know.” he laughed softly. She gripped the back of his jacket tightly.

            “You’re a jerk, too.” she sniffed. With that, pressed closer to him and made no sign of leaving. The Doctor inhaled sharply, attempting to get a better rein on his wildly fluctuating emotions and set himself to stroking Peri’s hair. If asked, he would insist that he was simply attempting to comfort her after her ordeal; but again he wasn’t sure if this was doing more to comfort himself. It was almost distressingly reassuring to feel her breathe, tucked safely against his chest. Well, as safely as she could be in the current situation. It took Peri some time for her legs to support her properly after being bound together, but the Doctor didn’t seem to even register supporting her weight.

 

            After a moment, Peri took a last long breath and pulled away from the Doctor.

            “Are you alright?” he asked gently.

            “No, I’m seeing parts of time, which apparently is going to drive me insane if I don’t stop it, I’m covered in cobwebs and bruises, I’m stiff and I’ve been pinned to a wall by what I have had ample time to establish as a mixture of Wisteria, two separate lianas, one of which has large flowers and one doesn’t, I think a Morning Glory just tried to bloom in my mouth, but I couldn’t really see it from this angle. And I’ve got a twig in my shoe. I think ‘not all right’ barely begins to cover it.”

            She sighed, and for a moment the soreness of her muscles and the relief of being relatively safe made most of her terror give way to exasperation.

            “Let’s just get out of here. We saw the Tardis a minute ago, if we can get back to floor level then we can probably find a way out.” Peri grumbled, ribbing some of the cobwebs off her arm. The Doctor froze and watched her curiously.

            “Peri, I’ve just realised what you look like.”

            “I don’t _care_ what I look like!” she grumbled, rubbing a piece of web into a ropy mess. “Just help me get all of this stuff off of me.”

            “But Peri, you look like a ghost. Or a woman in a bridal veil. I mean, from a distance…” Peri froze. Suddenly, she wanted a better look at herself. She looked down and pulled some of the webbing out from her legs. This was the dress. This was what she’d been seeing while she was dancing. Just an echo from the future, a time when she’d be wearing this “dress”. The Doctor clapped his hands to her biceps in excitement.

 

            “This must be what you saw on the stairs!” he exclaimed. “You saw yourself!”

            “I saw both of us.” Peri realised, covering her mouth. “You’re so covered in dust, I can barely make out any of the patterns on your coat. That’s why we were moving so strangely when I saw the ghosts dancing, what I saw was running backwards.”

            “So when you saw the man trying to kill his-” the Doctor began, “-his _dance partner_ , what you saw was me-”

            “-pulling me off the wall!” Peri finished. “And that’s why you were holding a knife! I thought he—well, you—must have been trying to kill, er, _me_ but it doesn’t even make sense that way. If you were holding a knife and trying to kill someone, you’d stab them, not throw them out of a window.”

            “The echo in time must have appeared to run backwards in your mind. It’s hardly surprising that there were little skips like that; you mind was having enough trouble processing the information as it was. Remember how each of your visions tried to work into the environment but didn’t quite manage it. Your mind is trying to translate this stimuli into something that makes sense.”

            “That actually explains why they were moving so funny.” Peri mused, biting her lip. “A waltz looks an awful lot like a waltz no matter which way it’s going, it would probably be hard for me to tell if it was running backwards at this distance… it did look a little like film running backwards, like when you rewind a tape.” She cocked her head.

            “Does this mean that we have to dance out of here?” Peri asked, wrinkling her nose. “I mean, if I saw an echo from the future of us dancing when we’re covered in dust and cobwebs right after you pulled me off the wall, doesn’t that mean that we have to do everything I saw backwards to make sure that I saw it?”

            “I shouldn’t think so.” the Doctor murmured, running a finger over his lips. “I think that the dancing you saw happened in the ballroom and your mind tried to make it interact with the setting, so it appeared in that order. Which would account for it being backwards.”

            “Like how the sharks were spoons until I started hallucinating?” Peri asked. “Or… how everything _was_ something that made sense until it started moving or turned into-”

            “Shh!” the Doctor said suddenly.

 

            The Doctor held up a finger and listened intently.

            “Peri, do you hear that?” he asked. She paused and tried to pick out a faint noise beyond her own heartbeat. She marvelled at how the house made every noise seem quiet and loud at the same time. She began to hear a faint, ringing note or two on the edge of her perception. Rather like a music box.

            The Doctor began to hum the tune Peri had described on the wind chimes, the simple waltz that kept the time when they had danced through the forest. Peri’s eyes grew wide and she joined in with all of the intensity one can hum a nursery rhyme. The two of them made eye contact, all but shouting the wordless notes at each other and then turning to run towards the source of the music.

 

            The music grew faintly louder the further they moved into the dark. Almost instinctively, the Doctor grasped Peri’s hand. He was determined that when they fell through the floor, it would be the last time they separated until they’d left this madhouse. Even then not for some time after, to settle his mind if nothing else. With their free hands, they groped forward in the darkness.

 

            “I still can’t believe you dropped the flashlight.” Peri sighed, stepping over what she really hoped was a root.

            “And I can’t believe that your eyes haven’t adjusted yet.” the Doctor replied. “Granted, I can’t quite see myself but that’s another matter entirely. I’ve only just regained consciousness; it’s entirely possible that I was concussed in the fall.”

            He looked around, willing the various gradations of shadow to form into the wine racks or catacombs he had seen before, some setting more substantial than wandering through the dark. He squinted into a particular patch of shadow.

            “Peri,” he asked. “Is it my eyes, or is it a bit lighter over there?”

            “Are you pointing at something right now؟” Peri muttered. The Doctor placed two fingers under her chin and angled her head into the direction he was facing. She narrowed her eyes half out of frustration and half in an attempt to focus her vision.

            “…I _think_ I see what you’re talking about.” said Peri. “I also think that if you ever do that when it’s light enough for me to see where your nose is, I’m going to punch it.”

            “Noted.” the Doctor answered, guiding them towards the light. “I suppose we are the proverbial moths once again, moving towards the flame.”

            “Yeah, because that worked so well last time.” Peri scoffed. “I think I see where the light is coming from... I think that’s a flight of stairs, but it’s hard to tell in the dark—oof!”

            The Doctor turned slightly and helped Peri remain upright.

            “Are you alright, Peri?” the Doctor asked.

            “I’m _fine_ , I just lost a shoe back there. It’s fine, I haven’t had the other one since we fell through that hole in the floor.”

            “Careful, then. I’m not entirely sure if we should trust these stairs to support our weight, given how the floor gave way beneath us; and there’s certainly some loose nails at this point.”

 

            They reached the stairs and gazed up for some hint of where they led. The steps made a broad helix, half embedded in the ceiling. The steps were just broad enough for two children to walk abreast; but anyone, adult or not, fitting beside the Doctor on these steps was quite out of the question. The neatly cut but now weathered steps hung off the central pole, meeting with the wall on one side but simply hanging off in space without so much as a guardrail on the opposite side.

            Peri’s mind flashed to girl’s summer camp where fourteen-year-old girls found their amusement hiding under similar stairs in the cabins and grabbing the ankles of ten year olds innocently trying to get a bed upstairs. It would be only too easy for someone on the flight below her to reach under a step and grab her ankle, and on these stairs she’d have much further to fall than she did in seventy-five. A murky sort of light filtered from an unseen point at the top, but the curvature of the spiral hid its source.

            “There’s at least two flights here.” Peri commented.

            “Splendid.” said the Doctor. “That ought to just bring us to the surface. This basement is nothing short of cavernous.”

 

            The Doctor gave her hand a comforting squeeze, more to assure himself he hadn’t lost track of her again than for Peri’s benefit. She squeezed it back, and a wave of relief flooded through his body. He started leading her up the stairs.

            The treads creaked quietly underfoot but held their weight, their steady footfalls shifting to background noise as they approached the tinkling above. The Doctor hummed it for a moment, just under his breath as to not drown out the noise.

            “Dum da da dum dada dum dada dada…‘ _Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?’_ lo, _‘Why and what art thou dreaming here?’”_ the Doctor sang uncertainly, rhythm of the words not quite matching the beat of the music. _“‘Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas, a wonder to these garden trees!’_ …no. No, it doesn’t work at all. _”_ He frowned.

            “Poe again, Doctor?”

            “It was just a thought.” he admitted sheepishly. “I rather doubted the poem which had taken residence in my mind would match the beat of this music, but it was close enough I wanted to check.”

 

            The travellers ascended deeper into the house, light increasing in barely discernable increments as they rose from the basement. As the staircase curved, another wall met the opposite side of the stairs, enclosing the pair in a dark, curving hallway. The cobwebs got thicker, spreading from one wall to another in sheets.

            “I can’t deny there’s a dreamlike quality to the whole scenario; climbing a long staircase in the dark and listening for a music box.” the Doctor commented. He couldn’t quite see her face in the dark, but he had lived with Peri long enough that he could feel when she was giving him _that look._

            “You and I obviously dream about _very_ different things.” she said dryly.

 

            At length, Peri noticed a thin beam of light, like the edge of a door near what she assumed was the top of the stairs. She gave the Doctor’s hand a squeeze.

            “I see it, no need to wrench my hand off. That must have been casting the light we saw the stairs from. No wonder it was so very thin in the basement, there’s barely enough to light the top step.”

            “I’m just saying maybe we should take two flashlights next time.”

            “The trouble is we _did_ each have a torch, sadly we promptly lost the both of them.” the Doctor sighed, reaching the door. “It will be a moot point shortly.”

 

            The Doctor pulled open the door. Peri gave a small yelp of terror at the view beyond.

It was difficult to say precisely what the creatures were how many of them were there. But there were enough of them to fill her vision, swarming down the dark stairwell and upon them. They had leathery wings like bats with small barbs on the joints, but too many of them. Peri wasn’t quite sure if there were four or six wings to each animal, but they appeared to be attached backwards. Their bodies looked nearly round, roughly the size of an apple, and if they had necks, they were lost in the dense fur.

 

            Peri automatically crossed her arms in front of her face and turned away, bracing herself for the barrage of wings. None came.

            “Peri...?” the Doctor asked, touching her shoulder with concern. She cracked open one eye. The first thing her eyes met was another set. Small, unblinking, round blue eyes fringed with black lashes. Glass eyes, set in a large china doll sitting against a wall in a sunny room. While this was startling, it was hardly a swarm of bats and Peri couldn’t help but feel a bit silly about it.

            “Peri, are you alright?” the Doctor asked.

            “I think I saw another echo.” Peri breathed. “Just surprised me, that’s all.”

 

            The door opened upon a hallway, the view from the frame nearly entirely filled by another door just across the hall. That door was open, giving a clear view of the room beyond. Unlike every other room they’d come across thus far, this one looked as if it was recently lived in.

            Sunlight filtered in through the windows, the warm golden light of afternoon on an autumn day. At first, Peri assumed that the diffuse light was the result of the windows being as dusty as they had been in the rest of the house, but on closer inspection it was apparently that all of the windows had white lace curtains, rather like what the Doctor and Peri had taken the arachnoid webs in the drawing room to be. Dolls and stuffed toys lined the walls on white shelves, each tucked into their own curved alcove. Much of the floor was covered in a pale blue carpet with a floral design worked out in peach and mint. As she entered the room, Peri became aware of the fact that this was a nursery or perhaps a playroom. There were no beds, which suggested the latter. A large book with glossy illustrations lay open on a small table lain with a pink tin tea set.

            “Doctor, look.”

            “Oh, Peri, come out of there.” he muttered in exasperation. “You were only too eager to leave this house a moment ago.”

            “But Doctor, it’s the bear.” Peri said urgently, lifting the book from the table. He narrowed his eyes and strode over to her.

 

            Peri indicated an illustration the book had been laid open to. It was something to do with an extinct species of bear with large teeth and a shaggy golden mane. In brilliant coloured pencil, some artist had rendered an idea of what an ancient animal might have looked like. To the left of the illustration was a photograph of the wired-together skeleton and a caption describing where the bones had been found.

            “Is this what you saw in the drawing room?” the Doctor asked.

            “More or less, but the artist got the nose wrong.”

            “Cartilage is rarely found in fossils, Peri.”

            “I know that!” Peri scoffed. “I can’t tune out Howard _all_ the time; I know what you find in an archaeology site. Of course… this looks like a book on prehistoric animals and he specialised in ancient civilisations, so it probably wouldn’t be anything he studied even if this _was_ Earth. I’m just impressed with how close they got the color.”

            “Well, that’s archaeology for you. Half of its guesswork, and you’re just as likely to get the nose wrong as the colour right.” the Doctor shrugged, flipping to the next page.

            “I don’t suppose that we’ll see the arachnoids or the glowbugs in here, as they are clearly still alive when this book was made and it seems be a children’s guide to the extinct creatures with the largest teeth.”

            “I guess not, but there’s the bats I just saw.” Peri pointed out, touching the page. “Let’s see if I can find those little sharks from the greenhouse.”

            “That makes sense, if you’re sensing echoes in time. Seeing creatures that used to live here sounds like a perfectly normal sort of echo. That’s what most ghosts are.”

            “Doesn’t that mean when I saw us dancing on the stairs, that I was perfectly right to call it a ghost?”

            “Oh, I’ve been wrong before and I’ll be wrong again! You needn’t lay it on with a trowel!” the Doctor frowned. Peri smirked at him and looked back at the tea set.

 

            “What kind of little girl has a stuffed animal tea party with a book on prehistoric monsters laying open on the table?” Peri asked, wrinkling her nose.

            “Oh, come Peri. There’s a wide variety of little girls in the universe. I’ve travelled with many of them.”

            “I’m just saying I when I was little, I’d finish pretending I was fighting dinosaurs and put the book away _before_ I force-fed my teddy fruit juice.”

            “Really?”

            “Well, I’d close it.” she admitted.

            “Perhaps she was pretending to take tea with Neolithic beasts.” said the Doctor. “That’s the sort of thing that always sounds terribly exotic before you do it.”

            “Hey, you told me that I couldn’t call those guys mastodons, so you don’t get to either. We’ve had tea with the count and countess Scwep, who looked perfectly normal for their species.” Peri corrected, waggling a finger at the Doctor. He grinned at her. The pair glanced around the nursery.

 

            “This looks well cared-for.” Peri mused. “I think someone still lives here.”

            “Reimer had no children, so far as I am aware. At least the family name stopped being used in that generation; I never met them personally. I think that we’ve entered a period from before they took up residence in this house.”

            “Doctor, if we aren’t in the time period when we landed, how are we going to get back to the Tardis?”

            “I also can’t help but worry about the current residents finding us in their nursery.” he mused, glancing around. He turned his eyes back to Peri.

            “Oh, yes; that’s what I was coming in here to tell you. There’s a window at the end of the hallway with an overlarge creeper trailing out of it. The Tardis is just beyond that, I saw it from the window.”

            Peri almost dropped the book in shock.

            “You saw the Tardis and you didn’t say anything‽”

            “I was distracted. I hadn’t seen this room before.”

            “But we’ve been looking for it for hours!”

            “Peri, if alien environments didn’t distract me from my ship, then I’d never leave it!” the Doctor protested, spreading his arms. He strode away from her in order to look properly offended, then stopped to examine what appeared to be a small jewellery box.

 

            He lifted it in his hands and examined the box. It was made of white china with gilt edging, a bit larger than a teacup and much heavier. A vaguely rococo relief of a ballroom circled the base of the object, with a small key protruding from the very bottom. It probably would have hit the surface it was resting on if the object didn’t have little curved feet. Fascinated, the Doctor lifted the lid.

            A pair of minute dancers extended themselves from the inside of the box and began to rotate in place in front a tiny mirror in the box’s lid as a surprisingly loud waltz jangled out from beneath the pair.

            Peri spun about in place, looking more annoyed with the Doctor than startled by the noise. The Doctor quickly returned the china box to the shelf he found it on. In doing so, he failed to close the lid and the music continued to fill the nursery.

            “Turn that off!” Peri hissed quietly. “If someone still lives here, they’ll probably get freaked out if a music box starts playing by itself in a room they thought was empty!”

            “Oh, and you’re doing so much better, thumbing through that book! You’ll get it covered in dust and cobwebs, you’re head to toe in the mess!”

            He cocked his head and smiled.

            “Although I must say, it is rather an improvement in many ways. It could stand to have more colour, of course. Those flowers can only do so much.”

            “Shut up.” she retorted. “The same could be said for you, that outfit only looks a _little_ weird in all white.”

 

            Peri paused to think of another cutting remark, but found herself distracted by the music. She blinked and pointed at the china box.

            “Doctor, that’s what I was hearing all day.” she exclaimed. “That tune, played on that music box. That’s it exactly.”

            “Then,” said the Doctor, twisting the key firmly, “I’d best wind this up firmly to guide us here; or else I’ll never come here and wind the music box.”

            “But Doctor, isn’t that a paradox?” Peri asked.

            “Yes.” he answered simply. The Doctor returned the music box to the shelf, and Peri placed the book back on the table and adjusted it to roughly the position she found it in.

 

            Just then, a large round stuffed chicken fell off of a shelf. Peri jumped almost a foot in the air and the Doctor gripped her arm tightly. Their eyes turned directly towards the noise.

            A plump tricolour cat was sitting on the shelf where the chicken had recently been, wrapping its tail around its paws and wearing an expression as if it were unimpressed with the mettle of the saviours of several planets. Peri breathed a sigh of relief that quickly dissolved into laughter.

            “Good heavens.” murmured the Doctor, “Unless I’ve very much mistaken, that’s Dr. Reimer’s cat.”

            “What?” she asked. He broke away from her and took a step towards the cat.

            “The cat, Peri. The journal mentioned that his cat had been lost in a stray temporal zone when the house was covered. And we have found the poor creature.” He bent to his knee and chriupped at the calico. Whatever graces the Doctor lacked with other sentients clearly did not apply to animals, as the cat scampered quickly across the floor to sniff at the timelord’s fingers.

            “Aren’t you a lovely girl?” he smiled, stroking its head. The cat purred and butted the Doctor’s hand, then proceeded to weave between his legs.

            “Well, we can’t leave you here, can we?” the Doctor murmured fondly, rubbing the animal’s ears. “Dr. Reimer’s ledger said as much.”

            “Doctor, you’re not thinking of keeping the cat, are you?” Peri asked exasperatedly.

            “Why ever not?” he asked, scratching it behind the ears.

            “If you can’t keep us safe, what hope does the cat have?”

            “Well, we certainly can’t leave her here.” he said firmly, bundling the animal into his arms. “We do know that her master shan’t be returning for her. I’ll drop her off at a more suitable home. She won’t be the first refugee I’ve relocated, and she’s much less likely to report me to the time council than others.”

            Peri sighed fondly, shaking her head.

            “Well, if we’re taking her with us, we’d better get going.” she said. “I know I need a shower, and you have just as much dust and pollen on you as I do. And _in_ you.”

            “I agree both of us could do with a bath.” he tapped the cat’s nose. “ _You’re_ not invited.”

            “A bath and some kind of detox?” Peri suggested. “I still haven’t forgotten about the whole ‘hallucinate until you go insane’ thing you mentioned.”

            “Yes, I do suppose time is of the essence on that count.” said the Doctor, although he didn’t sound very worried. “A bath, a cup of Alatarian nettle tea, and a few lab tests. Just entering the Tardis’ containment field should do you a world of good, and failing that we should get you Trans-Matted. That clears out most toxins and it would be a good place to look for a home for Puss.”

            He turned to face the animal to his companion.

            “Come along my dear. Say hello to your new mummy.”


	8. Epilogue: Busting Out of This Old Haunted House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Far in the past, the temporal anomalies start.

 

            “Mummy, come quick! Before it goes away!”

            “Yes darling, we’re coming, we’re coming.”

            The little girl skittered to a stop the doorway of her bedroom. Long dark curls bounced around her face as she looked around the room. Her parents followed.

            “It was here, I swear it was! A big fat cat I’ve never seen before!” she whimpered, looking around.

            “And Chanticlaire’s fallen off his shelf!” the little girl gasped, scooping the stuffed chicken into her arms. Her lip trembled violently.

            “Oh, mummy! Daddy, you must believe me! I didn’t imagine this!”

            “Yes, darling, we believe you.” the mother soothed, moving further into the room.

            “The music box…” the father whispered in horror. He smoothed his moustache nervously. The little girl clutched at her father’s legs.

            “It wasn’t playing when I left the room, daddy! I swear it!”

            “No… no of course it wasn’t.” he gasped, bundling his daughter into his arms.

            “The maids have been seeing the bridal couple for weeks now, darling.” his wife cooed fretfully. “This is becoming all too much!”

            “What do you think we should do?” the father asked, stroking his daughter’s hair. “We can’t simply up and leave, can we? We’ve just put in that field.”

            “That odd Dr. Reimer’s been after us to sell her the house for ages.” said the mother, taking hold of her husband’s hand. “I think we’d better take her offer and try our luck closer to homeworld. It’s— _funny_ out in the colonies.”

            He nodded slowly.

            “Yes. Yes, I think we’d better had.”

 

 

            Peri shifted the cat in her arms. The Doctor seemed to have forgotten the reaction she’d had to Erimem’s cat and set Peri to minding the animal while he opened the Tardis.

            “So, you still think the temporal anomalies were limited to the house, Doctor?” she asked dryly.

            “Sarcasm does not suit you in the least, my dear.” the Doctor muttered irritably, hacking away at the vines which had covered the Tardis with his penknife.

            He gazed wearily at Peri. The Doctor was still very much torn between offering to replace her mounting book and demanding that she never take cuttings again. It probably hinged on whether or not he could find a proper flower press. She sighed and resumed clearing the Tardis. He had already decided against pointing out that in this particular case, Peri had been the one to mistake her for his bride.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Owl City song, "Plant Life".


End file.
